example of transcendent memory and oracle databases

I did some tests with tmem using an Oracle Database 11gR2 and swingbench setup. You can see a graph below. Let me try to explain what this means.

Using Oracle VM 3 with some changes booting dom0 (additional parameters at the boot prompt) and with UEK2 as a guest kernel in my VM, I can make use of autoballooning. What you see in the graph below is very simple : it's a timeline (horizontal)of how much actual memory the VM is using/needing. I created 3 16GB VMs that I wanted to run on a 36GB Oracle VM server (so more VM memory than we have physically available in the server). When I start a 16GB VM (vertical) the Linux guest immediately balloons down to about 700Mb in size. It automatically releases pages to the hypervisor that are not needed, it's free/idle memory otherwise. Then I start a database with a 4GB SGA, as you can see, the second I start the DB, the VM grows to just over 4GB in size. Then I start swingbench runs, 25, 50, 100, 500, 1000 users.