Swapping Issues and ora_dbw

I have a test server with three instances running and I have been seeing that swapping issues. The server is running out of swap space, been flirting on the edge of 0. I dug a little deeper an found that the main culprits are two of the instances:

49069 oradev    20   0 12.2g  10g  10g S  0.0 21.5  40:44.19 ora_dbw0_DEV
49073 oradev    20   0 12.2g  10g  10g S  0.0 21.5  40:43.90 ora_dbw1_DEV
 4716 orapatch  20   0 12.2g 8.5g 8.5g S  0.0 17.9  33:20.19 ora_dbw1_PATCH
 4712 orapatch  20   0 12.2g 8.4g 8.4g S  0.0 17.9  31:45.49 ora_dbw0_PATCH

The weird thing is the third instance does not register although they are the same clone from the Production instance. Few questions:

• Is this not an unusually high percentage of memory for the process to hold?
• Is there a way to release the memory back to the server?
• Is there a way for me to dig deeper to find out why these two instances are holding so much memory?

Sys Info:
EBS R12.1.3
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production Linux 2.6.39-400.210.2.el5uek

Thanks,

Hilton Meyer
Database Administrator

Phone: +972-52-7908599
Office: +972-52-7908600 Fax: 1535-27908600 hilton_at_komit.co | www.komit.co<http://www.komit.co/>

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