PermGen errors in Jenkins

Question

I had cases of Jenkins failures and nothing but Jenkins redeployment (Jenkins is a webapp in Tomcat) helped. Even new jobs failed with PermGen space errors, but all the settings were fine (all these -XX:PermSize parameters everywhere it's possible). The point is after redeployment everything worked like a charm. But it's a harsh solution. I wanted to know, if there are some options to rollback Jenkins state. Thanks in advance.

Update: Okay, for those, who may face something like that, here is what I figured out. Those, who wrote that it's better to deploy Jenkins as a Tomcat module probably didn't face the problems of any kind of project deployment (with Jenkins Deploy plugin or with a tomcat-maven-plugin in Maven's pom.xml). I didn't have any of the problems I described when installed Jenkins separately. Whew!

Answer 1

The one setting that really matters for PermGen space errors is (and it must be this exactly):

-XX:MaxPermSize=512m

One dash, two Big Xs, Big-M, Big-P, Big-S, no-spaces, size-in-megs, lower case m. If you screw it up it will be ignored. 99% of all the PermGen fixes I see that "don't work" are because someone didn't follow instructions precisely and used a Big-M for megabytes instead of a little-m, or put two dashes in front instead of one for example.

Also, 512 megs is just a starting point... adjust to fit your system.