How can I prevent Tomcat process from eating up most of the Memory/RAM on Windows Server?

Noni Khutane April 12, 2018

We have Jira software installed on Windows server. The Tomcat process randomly uses up most of the RAM and releases it again after a while. This happens on a daily basis. 

1 answer

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Moga
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 17, 2018

Hi Noni,

JIRA runs on JAVA and uses Tomcat as a web application server. In JAVA, the amount of memory will be used by the application is set under the JVM input argument; Xmx

If the Xmx is set to 1024MB, then JIRA will use 1GB-ish memory of the machine. How to configure the Xmx is at Increasing JIRA application memory.

There is some similar topic in:

Best Regards,
Mogavenasan

Noni Khutane April 19, 2018

Hi Mogavenasan

I have looked through the links , however i am not sure if they can help in our situation. JVM was already allocated min 4GB and max of 8GB.

But you will find the memory dips happen almost everyday.jiraprod mem grahp.png

Moga
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 19, 2018

Hello Noni,

Can I know if the problem is that JIRA is more memory that we have allocated? Or the memory dips?

Since you have allocated 8GB max, that means JIRA will use up to 8GB RAM space. If your machine has only 8GB RAM, then please lower the Xmx value, or this might crash your JIRA machine.  

The memory dips are normal on JAVA application - JAVA has this thing called Garbage Collector where it frees up heap space. Hence, we will get a sawtooth graph for the heap space usage - this means the application is using the allocated heap and GC will kick in and clear those used heap and free them up for the application to use again.

Noni Khutane April 19, 2018

The memory dips on the graph are caused by tomcat/java service which is used by Jira.

So the interesting part is that the server. has more than 30gb of RAM. Does garbage collect have an effect on the perfomance of jira ?

 

But I understand what you are saying. This makes sense in terms of memory dips. But what if Jira consumes a lot of RAM memory. For example if you look at all the processes running you will find java/tomcat using more than 80% of RAM.

Thank you 

Moga
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 23, 2018

Hi Noni,

So the interesting part is that the server. has more than 30gb of disk space available. Does garbage collect have an effect on the perfomance of jira if it has to free up more space?

The context here is the RAM space, not disk space. 

But what if Jira consumes a lot of RAM memory. For example if you look at all the processes running you will find java/tomcat using more than 80% of RAM.

As mentioned before, JIRA will only use slightly more than the defined Xmx. From the memory graph that you have provided, we can see that it did not use anything more than 5GB. When you say 80% of RAM, what is your RAM size?

Noni Khutane April 24, 2018

Hi Mogavenasan

The RAM size is more than 30GB.

Moga
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 24, 2018

Heya Noni,

Can you provide a screenshot of the Xms and Xmx value? You can find this on System Info page under JVM Input Arguments.

Also a screenshot of total RAM installed on the machine and JIRA using up 80% of the RAM situation.

Best Regards, 
Mogavenasan

Noni Khutane May 9, 2018

Hi Mogavenasan

 

Sorry for the late response.

So the issue occurred both in a Windows environment and Linux environment.

It is actually a java process(Jira) that causes high memory and high CPU:

 

This is from the Linux Environment. This is similar to what happens on windows.

As shown below . There is 14 GB of Ram and the process used All 13GB:

the startup options you requested: -Xms1g -Xmx12g 

 

Screenshot_20180509_101301.pngScreenshot_20180509_101330.png

Kind Regards,

Moga
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 9, 2018

Hi Noni,

Please raise a Support ticket with us via https://support.atlassian.com/contact/ so that we can capture additional data and troubleshoot the performance problem. In the Support ticket, please provide the link to this Thread and also a Support ZIP.

Cheers,
Mogavenasan

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