Tomcat on production server, PermGen and redeploys

Question

It looks like

 MemoryError: PermGen space
 java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

is a common problem. You can Increase the size of your pe

Answer 1

Yes indeed, this is a problem. We're running three web apps on a Tomcat server: No. 1 uses a web application framework, Hibernate and many other JARs, no. 2 uses Hibernate and a few JARs and no. 3 is basically a very simple JSP application.

When we deploy no. 1, we always restart Tomcat. Otherwise a PermGen space error will soon bite us. No. 2 can sometimes be deployed without problem, but since it often changes when no. 1 does as well, a restart is scheduled anyway. No. 3 poses no problem at all and can be deployed as often as needed without problem.

So, yes, we usually restart Tomcat. But we're also looking forward to Tomcat 7, which is supposed to handle many memory / class loader problems that are burried into different third-party JARs and frameworks.