Significance of PermGen Space

Question

What is the significance of PermGen space in java?

Answer 1

The permanent generation holds meta-data describing user classes (classes that are not part of the Java language).

Applications with large code-base can fill up this segment of the heap which will cause java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen. This is not affected by the -Xmx setting or how much memory you have on the machine. To set a new initial size, use -XX:PermSize=64m. To set a maximum size, use -XX:MaxPermSize=128m