I recently began profiling an osgi java application that I am writing using VisualVM. One thing I have noticed is that when the application starts sending data to a client (over JMS), the number of loaded classes starts increasing at a steady rate. The Heap size and the PermGen size remains constant, however. The number of classes never falls, even after it stops sending data. Is this a memory leak? I think it is, because the loaded classes have to be stored somewhere, however the heap and permgen never increase even after I run the application for several hours.
For the screenshot of my profiling application go here
Thanks for your help. I figured out what the problem is. In one of my classes, I was using Jaxb to create an XML string. In doing this, JAXB ueses reflection to create a new class.
So although the JAXBContext wasn’t saying around in the heap, the classes had been loaded.
I have run my program again, and I see a normal plateau as I would expect.