Yes, it's safe to lower the -Xmx setting to something lower. With the Sun JRE it will not allocate all the heap space unless it's necessary. In my dev setup with the agent monitoring Tomcat, JBoss, Mac OSX and Postgres the agent only is using 5 MB of heap space.
As for the overall memory footprint, most of the memory is virtual and is shared with the system. My agent on OSX consumes about 48MB of real memory.
Admittedly this is still a still a pretty large number, but that's the tradeoff we had to make to allow us to manage the largest set of applications.
Depending on what you are trying to monitor, it's also possible to run the agent on a different machine and do the checks remotely. This limits our ability to autodiscover the applications and narrows the depth of metrics we can collect, but it's an option.
Hope that helps,
-Ryan
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