I would just like to say first off I dislike how linux manages memory. At anyrate. I have tomcat cat installed.

This is what I get when I run it:

798 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
799 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:01 java
804 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
807 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
941 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
943 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
945 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
953 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:01 java
1124 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1125 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1147 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1167 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1183 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1207 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1230 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1235 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1236 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1237 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1242 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1250 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java
1258 admin 0 0 19812 19M 6796 S 4 0.0 3.0 0:00 java



As of now, I have not edited the config very much, I am hopeing to get it down to a few of those. At anyrate, with all this running, that 399 megs of ram used. Now he comes the stupid question. Is it really using all of that. With what I am running, there will be 4-5 instances of that running above in a month or two(4-5 of 21 19 megs javas). Anyhelp would be great

I am no Tomcat guru, but you can't blame Linux for tomcat being a resource hog.

You are not really using that much memory. Those are threads. Actually your tomcat is only using about 19MB of memory. If you have a lot of process with the same name and the same amount of memory, then probably they are sharing the memory. This is different, for example, on Solaris implementation of threading, where one threaded process get shown as one process, as opposed one threaded process get shown as more than one process, depending on how many threads running for that process in Linux. For now you should believe that it doesn't use that much memory.

But still, 19MB of memory is a huge number when compared with Apache running PHP module or mod_perl.