How much Solaris memory allocated by ASE 15.0.3?

Hi.

I'm running ASE 15.0.3 on a Solaris 10 system. There is 16GB physical memory. I have set max memory to 15GB. Also, allocate max shared memory is 0, and dynamic allocation on demand is 1. When I look at total logical memory it shows as 13GB.

I have been having problems on this system, getting occasional "Vfork failed" errors, which I take to mean the system is running out of memory. So I have been looking at top and other tools to try to get a handle on that.

Those tools are telling me that the ASE engine is using 15GB of memory. Also, when I had Oracle tech support analyze the problem, they said the same thing. But based on the ASE memory settings I listed above, I would expect that it should be using only 13GB.

I conclude that I must be misunderstanding either ASE's memory strategy, or the output of the top command. Does anyone have any insights?

Thanks.

- John.