Why is the Netprobe process consuming high virtual memory (e.g. 30GB) in RHEL 6

This is due to the Operating System's glibc libraries.

The high virtual memory allocation is due to RHEL 6's glibc libraries. There is an OS setting that can further tune the virtual memory allocation if needed. Below are the links to the said online articles:

Why do some applications use significantly more virtual memory on RHEL 6 compared to RHEL 5
Linux RHEL6 allocates more memory to run java program
Linux glibc >= 2.10 (RHEL 6) malloc may show excessive virtual memory usage

Tests were run in-house to demonstrate this scenario. 2 Netprobes running the same set of JMX samplers were installed on RHEL 5 and 6 machine. The results were as follows:

RHEL 5 Netprobe (~1GB virtual memory)

RHEL 6 (~8GB virtual memory)

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