PAM : How to give more memory to tomcat ?

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)
• CA Privileged Access Manager - Cloakware Password Authority (PA)
• CA Privileged Access Manager - Server Control (PAMSC)

Issue/Introduction

How can we get PAM virtual instances to allocate more memory (heap size) to the tomcat service that is responsible for credential management?
We found informational messages in catalina.out, which indicated tomcat memory usage exceeding 70%.


[ClusterManager] [3.12] processors=4, physical.memory.total=15.7G, physical.memory.free=6.9G, swap.space.total=0, swap.space.free=0, heap.memory.used=2.5G, heap.memory.free=728.2M, heap.memory.total=3.2G, heap.memory.max=3.2G, heap.memory.used/total=77.77%, heap.memory.used/max=77.77%,

Environment

Release : 4.1.X

Component : PRIVILEGED ACCESS MANAGEMENT

Resolution

Increase the total RAM size allocated to the appliance. The recommended RAM size is 64 GB, see documentation page Installation Requirements.
PAM uses a script that allocates memory to the main services based on the size of the RAM.
Increasing the RAM size will lead to higher memory allocations for the database, credential manager and session recording services, reducing the risk that a service runs out of memory and providing better performance.

Note that the numbers shown in the log message above don't necessarily indicate that the memory allocation is insufficient. JREs don't do aggressive garbage collection as long as there is no overall resource shortage and tend to hold on to memory that could be released, if really needed for other purposes. Processes run more efficiently when data is retained in memory rather than having to read it repeatedly from disk.

Additional Information

Here is tomcat memory size example how it comes with total RAM size.

16GB box : -Xms3276M -Xmx3276M
24GB box : -Xms4915M -Xmx4915M
32GB box : -Xms6553M -Xmx6553M