Memory... Memory............ and Memory......

Question

Hi,
We are developing a multi-user client side application, and now we r in to serious memory problems... tried lots of suggested techniques else where in form like making objects eligeble for gc ect...
still I am puzzled by the fact of unwarranted usage of heap.
off late I have been expementing with -verbose:gc option,according to my observation even though there is lots of heap availble to jvm it just keeps increasing,
[Full GC 18689K->11689K(65280K), 0.0063896 secs]
in the scenarios like above, where free memory availble is around 65Mb
and used memory is 11Mb. UI operations take some amt of memory. well what I mean here is that memory shown in windows task bar shoots up , even though there is sufficient memory availble,
well below are my questions.
*first One: I guess the memory usage shown for java.exe in windows task bar
should alwasy be equals to total memory availble+total memory used by JVM
well this is not the case.
* second one: even thought when there is sufficient free mem availble for Jvm. (as in above example) why is that memory shown in windows task bar always climb up.
* third one: the memory shows in the task bar never comes down even though
my application is not using that much memory.
can any body help me in understanding these issues.
cheers
deepak

Answer 1

One thing to try out is to replace the version of Java. I had a problem with a Java application server running under Java 1.3.1 on Win2K. The program would at times suddenly start consuming vast amounts of NT memory space and eventually died when all real memory and swap space were exhausted - of course long before then performance went into the crapper.
The solution? I installed Sun Java 1.3.1_03 and all was well. Never did fuigure out why one system did this while others with (as best as I could identify) identical configurations did not seem to ever get into this state.
Chuck