Thanks Pando, Jeff and srlhome00 so much and I have the feeling that something to do with the Kernal but I am not sure b/c I am new with Linux

I run what Pando advise me to run : Log in as root and I run:

echo 671088640 > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

and I did bounce the database


CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 100.0% idle
Mem: 643708K av, 57416K used, 586292K free, 0K shrd, 4764K buff
Swap: 1518100K av, 0K used, 1518100K free 22920K cached



and this is after I just run analyze statistic on one schema which had about 150 tables:


CPU states: 0.1% user, 0.1% system, 0.0% nice, 99.6% idle
Mem: 643708K av, 634884K used, 8824K free, 0K shrd, 25296K buff
Swap: 1518100K av, 0K used, 1518100K free 563068K cached


The question is I could understand the memory will peak up b/c of the process I ran but how come it doesn't go down when this process finish ???

please don't be upset if I keep coming back with this issue but it does bother me.

thanks so much for all of help.