JVM OutOfMemory error “death spiral” (not memory leak)

Question

We have recently been migrating a number of applications from running under RedHat linux JDK1.6.0_03 to Solaris 10u8 JDK1.6.0_16 (much higher spec machines) and we have not

Answer 1

Interesting problem. Sounds like one of the garbage collectors works poorly on your particular situation.

Have you tried changing the garbage collector being used? There are a LOT of GC options, and figuring out which ones are optimal seems to be a bit of a black art, but I wonder if a basic change would work for you.

I know there is a "Server" GC that tends to work a lot better than the default ones. Are you using that?

Threaded GC (which I believe is the default) is probably the worst for your particular situation, I've noticed that it tends to be much less aggressive when the machine is busy.

One thing I've noticed, it often takes two GCs to convince Java to actually take out the trash. I think the first one tends to unlink a bunch of objects and the second actually deletes them. What you might want to do is occasionally force two garbage collections. This WILL cause a significant GC pause, but I've never seen a case where it took more than two to clean out the entire heap.