Hi Frans,
Are you running virtualbox or vmware? I just did launched on my mac machine with virtualbox the HDP 2.3 version and launched spark and hbase on the system, this how much memory is still available:
root@sandbox ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7870 4770 3100 7 19 304
-/+ buffers/cache: 4445 3424
Swap: 4999 0 4999
[root@sandbox ~]#
Hence not able to reproduce.
Regards,
Robert