What I have seen is that if there is a reasonably heavy load for a short amount of time, you can have too many sessions in memory that have not yet hit their session timeout value, and so cannot be freed by the garbage collector. It is very easy to run out of memory well before sessions start being let go. As far as I can tell though, once the sessions were freed, the memory itself cleared up. (These comments apply to 4.1.28 BTW)
Jeff, have you tried a different session manager than the default (which is org.apache.catalina.session.StandardManager)? For example, org.apache.catalina.session.PersistentManager claims to be able to start swapping out inactive sessions to disk to save memory.
http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/config/manager.html
A config like this inserted into your context should solve your memory issues with some performance hit if a session is swapped out to disk and is later swapped in. However, the docs do warn that the manager hasn't been heavily tested.
<Manager className="org.apache.catalina.session.PersistentManager"
minIdleSwap="-1"
maxIdleSwap="120"
maxIdleBackup="-1">
<Store className="org.apache.catalina.session.FileStore"/>
</Manager>The above config should swap out any sessions which haven't been accessed in the last 2 minutes. You can also config a JDBC store.
-Dave
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