I was wondering if anyone has seen any problems with weird memory problems with Red Hat ES 3 Sp1? The problem that I'm seeing on my installation is after a short amount of time the physical memory falls to 7% from 50% and the virtual memory rises from 0% to 41%. The machine has 2gig of ram and 2gig of swap. The only thing that is running on the system is Tomcat using Jrockit JVM.

Thanks
Jon

That's actually quite to be expected ... Everything's fine.

The way that Linux looks at RAM is that "it's a resource to be used." If there's some space available, Linux would like to put something into it! (Why not?) And it will keep it there until, and unless, there's actually some pressure to do something else with the space. (Who knows... you might need it again soon... and if there's no pressure, why bother dumping it now?)

The virtual memory is probably stuff that your program(s) are using, or may need to use. The rest of the space is probably mostly used by buffer memory, which is recently-used files. (Buffer is the lowest-priority use of memory; the first to be discarded when memory-pressure develops.)

Yes, Linux performance is not measured by the resources that are free at any given moment. They're just being used