What does PermGen actually stand for?

Question

I know what PermGen is, what it\'s used for, why it fails, how to increase it etc.

What I don\'t know is what PermGen actually stands for. Permanent... Gen... someth

Answer 1

Permgen stands for Permanent Generation. It is one of the JVM memory areas. It's part of Heap with fixed size by using a flag called MaxPermSize.

Why the name "PermGen" ?

This permgen was named in early days of Java. Permgen mains keeps all the meta data of loaded classes. But the problem is that once a class is loaded it'll remain in the JVM till JVM shutdown. So name permgen is opt for that. But later, dynamic loading of classes came into picture but name was not changed. But with Java 8, they have addressed that issue as well. Now permagen was renamed as MetaSpace with dynamic memory size.