Interesting. Does the app determine how many java processes are spawned? I can reduce the # of processes to 19 with max_spare_threads=2 min" "1 max_threads=150 This is a non swapping setup. I wonder is the # of processes spawned determined by the app? 19 hm.. top+shift M: 62 processes: 60 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle total 0.1% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 99.8% Mem: 511972k av, 479692k used, 32280k free, 0k shrd, 68864k buff 318496k actv, 64172k in_d, 7100k in_c Swap: 1023992k av, 0k used, 1023992k free 299232k cached PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND 28120 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:19 0 java 28121 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:02 0 java 28122 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28123 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28124 xss 24 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28125 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:01 0 java 28126 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28127 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28130 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28131 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28132 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28133 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28134 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28135 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28136 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28137 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28138 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28139 xss 25 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 28140 xss 15 0 40268 39M 12328 S 0.0 7.8 0:00 0 java 27366 xss 15 0 2544 2544 2112 S 0.0 0.4 0:00 0 sshd 1188 root 15 0 2516 2516 1840 S 0.0 0.4 0:00 0 sendmail