Geoserver memory issues

Question

There seems to be a few issues raised about geoserver's memory usage - I'm wondering if someone can speculate as to why my memory use is so high.

I'm currently running geoserver 2.11.1 under tomcat7 with a -Xms set to 8gb and -Xmx set to 12Gb. I have 45,000 layers containing small shapefiles (~3Mb each) across the same number of stores and around 60 workspaces.

Memory use, using the rest of the default values from tomcat and geoserver, immediately reaches 8Gb and I can't figure out why this would be the case.

Thoughts include:

1) Garbage collection is inefficient 2) There is a memory leak 3) There is not enough memory on the server

Hopefully someone can shine some light on why memory use is so high - any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

The Xms is the startup memory size, so it is expected that your application takes this amount of memory. Now let's not forget that it reserves this memory, it doesn't necessarily use it right away.