Why does JIRA take so long to recover RAM?

[BBC Application Admin Team]

We're running load tests on JIRA v7.0.5, running on VMWare with 48GB of physical memory. It's an installation on RHEL7, using the provided JIRA tomcat. When we ran a 10-hour soak test, the free physical memory dropped down below 350Mb, at which point we stopped the test and then left the machine alone over the weekend, with literally no users. By this morning it had recovered about 2GB of physical memory, and continues at that pace.

I'm not sure where to start investigating this, if it's something we can even change. Does anyone have a clue why the free memory doesn't recover at a more reasonable rate when nobody is using the system, or am I just expecting too much from it?

Thanks

Matt

[Steve Behnke [DiscoverEquip.com]]

What are you doing with it? How much RAM do you have allocated to the JVM? What sort of garbage collection is occurring? How many CPU's are running? What is the status of the CPU during this period? Have you considered looking into increasing logging values? Have you considered profiling JIRA?

Etc.