Could you please indicate on which system you see this increase of RAM usage, and where you detect it?
Virtual memory usage is not an issue if this is only "virtual" memory.
What is really significant is the amount of "committed" memory, i.e. the one that really takes space in the physical memory or on the disk swap.
What the Java VM does here to allocate ranges of virtual pages is not very important, as Java places a very low priority to the garbage collector, notably if you've got plenty of physical RAM and there's no other stress on the system where Java would be unable to complete a memory allocation without collecting unused memory.
But if this is an issue on your system, we need complete system identification:
i.e. the OS and the Java version you use. You can get these informations in the Options dialog, in Bug Report, see an Example button.
I don't see this issue on my Windows XP installation. So I suppose this is MacOSX specific (and knowing which Java version you use may help tuning the VM usage on that platform; it may be difficult to adjust on MacOSX if Java is already configured to use shared memory across multiple VMs, such as the MacOSX Java desktop or your browsers; note that the shared VM is specific to Macs, and it stores precompiled classes for future use, until there's an low priority event that indicates to the VM manager to free up some unused space or classes).
Please be precise if you want help from the relevant people. |