Tracking down a memory leak / garbage-collection issue in Java

Question

This is a problem I have been trying to track down for a couple months now. I have a java app running that processes xml feeds and stores the result in a database. There hav

Answer 1

"Unfortunately, the problem also pops up sporadically, it seems to be unpredictable, it can run for days or even a week without having any problems, or it can fail 40 times in a day, and the only thing I can seem to catch consistently is that garbage collection is acting up."

Sounds like, this is bound to a use case which is executed up to 40 times a day and then not anymore for days. I hope, you do not just track only the symptoms. This must be something, that you can narrow down by tracing the actions of the application's actors (users, jobs, services).

If this happens by XML imports, you should compare the XML data of the 40 crashes day with data, that is imported on a zero crash day. Maybe it's some sort of logical problem, that you do not find inside your code, only.