Process Memory Vs Heap — JVM

Question

We have a web application deployed on a tomcat server. There are certain scheduled jobs which we run, after which the heap memory peaks up and settles down,

Answer 1

You can use -Xmx and -Xms settings to adjust the size of the heap. With tomcat you can set an environment variable before starting:

export JAVA_OPTS=”-Xms256m -Xmx512m”

This initially creates a heap of 256MB, with a max size of 512MB.

Some more details: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF25/Fix+'Out+of+Memory'+errors+by+increasing+available+memory