totalMemory Decreases Over Time
843829Jan 28 2009 — edited Feb 10 2009We have a Java application running on the Sun 1.5.0_09 JVM on a Solaris 8 server. When we started the application, we set the heap size settings as follows: -Xms256m -Xmx256m. With these settings we have typically found that a call to Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory() will return a constant value over time, because we essentially set the maximum and minimum heap size values to the same size. However, we have a couple of systems where the value returned by Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory() is decreasing over time. Can anyone explain how the total heap size can decrease when it has been set to a constant value? Note that we didn't have this problem on 1.4.2. We have only seen it on 1.5.0.