Red Hat ES Memory Management Question

[Jojo Paderes]

Hi,

Is it normal that inactive memory are not recycled
back to unused memory in Red Hat Linux after a long
period of time (i.e. after a week)?

I'm using Red Hat Linux Enterprise
2.4.9-e.25enterprise with 4G RAM and running a Java
server application that consumes around 22% RAM
resources (I used top to monitor this). While
conducting stress tests on the server app, the RAM
memory usage grew to around 50%. After shutting down
the server app, the memory used is still around 50%.
Here's a snapshot of the /proc/meminfo:

         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:
cached:
Mem:  4217606144 2042474496 2175131648        0
177762304 1692585984
Swap:              2147467264        0 2147467264
MemTotal:      4118756 kB
MemFree:       2124152 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:            173596 kB
Cached:           1652916 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:              1375916 kB
Inact_dirty:       450580 kB
Inact_clean:        16 kB
Inact_target:  1029612 kB
HighTotal:     3276720 kB
HighFree:      1913444 kB
LowTotal:       842036 kB
LowFree:        210708 kB
SwapTotal:     2097136 kB
SwapFree:      2097136 kB
BigPagesFree:        0 kB

Any constructive advice/tip will be greatly
appreciated. Thanks!


regards,

jOjO