RHEL 6, glibc & MALLOC_ARENA_MAX

We have recently upgraded from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6. After the upgrade, we are witnessing an increase in heap memory consumption for a JBoss application.

We read about the memory issues with glibc version 2.12 and suggestions of using the environment variable MALLOC_ARENA_MAX. We have set this variable value to ‘1’. With this, we see a reduction in vertual memory consumption but resident memory continues to grow.

What we expect is the same, if not better heap utilization by our application in RHEL 6. Can anyone in the forum please help with this issue?

System Details:

OS: RHEL 6.7
glibc version: glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.7.i686
Heap memory setting for application: -Xms1024m -Xmx4096m
Application container: JBoss 5.1

Thanks in advance for any help.