Hi Jeff,
this is allready some great advice for our sybase 16 engines, so they dont drain the memory of the server to fast.
but the memory usage isn't causing the problem with they sybase 9 engines i'm afraid.
when we start the 175 sybase 9 engines and the 95 sybase 16 engines, our server uses 12gb ram memory. but the server has a total of 64 GB ram, so that not even close to his limits.
at the end of the day, the server uses between 30gb and 35gb memory (but now i know why sybase 16 engines uses up that much, and how to stop them 
)
but even with 30gb of free memory we can only start 175 engines.
the remaining ones refuses to start, with only "database could not be started" error.
if need, i can provide some log files of the error
we added the -o option in the service to get the log file, but this also gives "database could be not be started"
i don't know if there are options for more extended logs?
thanks for the help allready!
Regards,
Stephen