Resolving java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen

Today our Alfresco doesn’t start due to this error:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen

The PermGen (permanent generation) holds data needed by the virtual machine to describe objects that do not have an equivalence at the Java language level like objects describing classes and methodse. So often large, complex apps will need lots of PermGen space. Similarly if you are doing frequent war/ear/jar deployments to running servers like Tomcat or JBoss you may need to issue a server restart after a few deploys or increase your PermGen space.

To increase the PermGen space use something like:

-XX:MaxPermSize=128m

The default is 64MB.

Note that Xmx is separate from the PermGen space, so increasing Xmx will not help with the PermGen errors (PermGen memory is in addition to the Xmx memory)

Java has other settings that could help control how much memory it uses:

-Xmx sets the maximum memory heap size
-Xms sets the minimum memory heap size.

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