Solaris /proc high physical memory usgae - solaris-10

Question

I'm using Solaris (Solaris 10 5/08 s10x_u5wos_10 X86) to run a jboss application.
root#dev3-be3:/proc/17197$ ps -ef | grep java
root 24685 24670 2 12:13:46 pts/10 225:54 java -Dprogram.name=run_with_profiler.sh -server -Xdebug -Xnoagent -Xrunjdwp:tr
root#dev3-be3:/proc/24685$ du -sh * | grep G
1.0G as
18G fd
root#dev3-be3:/proc/24685$
root#dev3-be3:/proc/24685$ prstat | grep 24685
24685 root 1041M 991M cpu0 0 0 4:01:35 51% java/200
root#dev3-be3:/proc/24685$ df -k
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/ 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /
/dev 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /dev
/export/home 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /export/home
/lib 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /lib
/opt 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /opt
/platform 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /platform
/sbin 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /sbin
/usr 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /usr
/usr/local 124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /usr/local
proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
ctfs 0 0 0 0% /system/contract
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
objfs 0 0 0 0% /system/object
swap 6115848 272 6115576 1% /etc/svc/volatile
/usr/lib/libc/libc_hwcap1.so.1
124960305 110368903 13341799 90% /lib/libc.so.1
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
swap 6132272 16696 6115576 1% /tmp
swap 6115588 12 6115576 1% /var/run
192.168.150.32:/sftp 461928730 38771266 423157464 9% /sftp
root#dev3-be3:/proc/24685$
Why this /proc/pid/fd has high physical memory? This gets cleared after shutting down server.

Answer 1

Use ps or prstat to figure out how much memory a process is using. Using du on /proc pseudo file system is at best dubious.

Answer 2

Running 'du' on /proc (which is a virtual filesystem) is nonsensical.
There is a very good description of /proc found in its manpage, proc(4).
If your real question is "why is my java application using so much memory?"
then you are better off check the manpages to see what effect the profiler
has on memory usage. You should also check what version of java you're using
(memory usage has improved greatly in later releases). It's probably worthwhile
looking into the heap, too (see pmap).
Then you should ask your developers what they're doing and whether it's all
necessary.