Jane, the memory requirements of Zenoss have significantly changed vs. older versions.  Our minimum commercial installation requirement is 8 gigabytes of memory.  As for the inclusion of Java now, as I understand it, our event processing system has been completely rewritten in the java framework for higher performance - I hope that in your testing you find this to be net beneficial.

Thanks for the feedback, I completely understand your concerns here, I've raised this and we're working on addressing this issue. Keep an eye out for these changes to make it into the appliances within the next 1-2 weeks.

Hey Folks - It's possible to scale the java heapsize back by doing the following. It shouldnt impact performance to much with a low number of devices.

1. vi /opt/zenoss/bin/zeneventserver. Append an -Xmx512m option to the DEFAULT_ZEP_JVM_ARGS. So that it looks like this:

    DEFAULT_ZEP_JVM_ARGS=${DEFAULT_ZEP_JVM_ARGS:-"-server -Xmx512m"}

2. zeneventserver restart as the zenoss user to apply these new settings.

There is also script called mysql tuner that might help with your mysql pain Jane.

wget http://mysqltuner.com/mysqltuner.pl

Optimizing Memory Usage for Zenoss 4: http://wiki.zenoss.org/Optimizing_Memory_Usage