Java taking too much memory on linux vm

Question

Doing a top shows this

top - 22:04:27 up  7:47,  3 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.08, 0.26
Tasks:   1 total,   0 running,   1 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  2.9% us,  0.9% sy,  0.0% ni, 95.9% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.2% si
Mem:   7914188k total,  2750184k used,  5164004k free,    54392k buffers
Swap: 16383992k total,        0k used, 16383992k free,   415828k cached

  PID USER    PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 2970 xxxxxx  18   0 24.5g 258m  10m S    0  3.3   0:42.05 java

VIRT is 24.5g and the hard disk is only 20g.

pmap -x 2970 reveals 95 times 262136k as anon.

Please advise as to is something wrong??

Answer 1

From a practical point of view (discover how much memory is used by the process) the VIRT column is almost meaningless, don't worry about it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/561245/virtual-memory-usage-from-java-under-linux-too-much-memory-used/561450#561450