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I'm playing around with writing some simple Spring-based web apps and deploying them to Tomcat. Almost immediately, I run into the need to customize the Tomcat's JVM settings with -XX:MaxPermSize (and -Xmx and -Xms); without this, the server easily runs out of PermGen space.
Why is this such an issue for Java VMs compared to other garbage collected languages? Comparing counts of "tune X memory usage" for X in Java, Ruby, Perl and Python, shows that Java has easily an order of magnitude more hits in Google than the other languages combined.
I'd also be interested in references to technical papers/blog-posts/etc explaining design choices behind JVM GC implementations, across different JVMs or compared to other interpreted language VMs (e.g. comparing Sun or IBM JVM to Parrot). Are there technical reasons why JVM users still have to deal with non-auto-tuning heap/permgen sizes?
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An interesting area when sizing the JVM is the JIT's code cache. By default, the HotSpot JVM will use up to 240MB. If the code cache is too small the JIT will run out of space to store its output and performance will suffer as a result. If the cache is too large, memory may be wasted.
Memory management is the process of allocating new objects and removing unused objects to make space for those new object allocations. This section presents some basic memory management concepts and explains the basics about object allocation and garbage collection in the Oracle JRockit JVM.
Java does memory management automatically. Java uses an automatic memory management system called a garbage collector. Thus, we are not required to implement memory management logic in our application.
But in 99% of the cases it is completely normal behaviour by the JVM. What you have specified via the -Xmx switches is limiting the memory consumed by your application heap. But besides the memory consumed by your application, the JVM itself also needs some elbow room.
The title of your question is misleading (not on purpose, I know): PermSize issues (and there are a lot of them, I was one of the first one to diagnose a Tomcat/Sun PermGen issue years ago, when there wasn't any knowledge on the issue yet) are not a Java specifity but a Sun VM specifity.
If you use a VM that doesn't use permanent generation (like, say, an IBM VM if I'm not mistaken) you cannot have permgen issues.
So it's is not a "Java" problem, but a Sun VM implementation problem.
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Java gives you a bit more control about memory -- strike one for people wanting to apply that control there, vs Ruby, Perl, and Python, which give you less control on that. Java's typical implementation is also very memory hungry (because it has a more advanced garbage collection approach) wrt the typical implementations of the dynamic languages... but if you look at JRuby or Jython you'll find it's not a language issue (when these different languages use the same underlying VM, memory issues are pretty much equalized). I don't know of a widespread "Perl on JVM" implementation, but if there's one I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be measurably different in terms of footprint from JRuby or Jython!
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