permanent-generation

I'm developing on the standard Lift platform (maven and jetty). I'm repeatedly (once every couple of days) getting this: Exception in thread "7048009@qtp-3179125-12" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space 2009-09-15 19:41:38.629::WARN: handle failed java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space This is in my dev environment. It's not a problem because I can keep restarting the server. In deployment I'm not having these problems so it's not a real issue. I'm just curious. I don't know too much about the JVM. I think I'm correct in thinking that permanent generation memory is for things like

I have been lately reading a lot on memory allocation schemes in java, and there have been many doubts as I have been reading from various sources. I have collected my concepts, and I would request to go through all of the points and comment on them. I came to know that memory allocation is JVM specific, so I must say beforehand, that my question is Sun specific. Classes (loaded by the classloaders) go in a special area on heap : Permanent Generation All the information related to a class like name of the class, Object arrays associated with the class, internal objects used by JVM (like java