[olug] Commanding java_vm to give memory back to the OS?

[Cesar Delgado]

The java_vm only runs when you have some applet running.  Well at least 
on the 3 machiens that I checked.  The java_vm is the "plug-in" version 
of the full Java VM.Do you have any open Firefox window that has some 
banner?  Some of the "new" banners are either flash or java so might 
have an applet running that you don't know of.

One funny thing about Java is you can tell it to do garbage collection 
'till you're blue in the face, but the Java standard only has 
instructions to ask the VM to politely do garbage collection, but it'll 
do it when it damn well pleases.  Yeah, I know, dumb.

Sorry I'm not much help,

-Cesar

Rob Townley wrote:
>    According to the "KDE System Guard" process list, my java_vm is
> using 276MegaBytes of memory.  I only have 256MB of physical ram, so
> my harddrive is swapping like crazy and wasting battery life.  I
> opened the java console and ran garbage collection, but the console
> says java is using less than 4MB of RAM.   I know for certain, that
> there are no Java applets running, so it should be using zero.  How
> can i command JAVA to give the memory back to the operating system
> that it is not using?
> 
>   At one time, there was NOT a standard C function to actually tell
> the C runtime to give the memory back to the OS.  The C runtime would
> keep the memory even though you had freed it.  But some operating
> systems have a  non standard call to free the memory.
> 
> 256MB RAM
> Java 1.5
> FireFox 1.5
> Debian Linux with 2.6 Kernel
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