Question

Since a few years i am developing with IDEA again, and i am happy so far.
The problem is just weird memory usage behaviour and GC action while i am working on projects which causes my IDE freeze for a few seconds while GC is doing its job.
Regardless of how big the project is, i am working on, after a few days the memory usage increases upto 500 MBs (my heap space max 512 MB and actually, i assume, it had to be sufficient for web projects which has ca 100 java files). After GC did its job, i get 400 MB used – not collected – and just ca 100 MB free on heap and in a few mins the memory usage increases the heap is full again.

JVM version is 19.0-b09

using thread-local object allocation.
Parallel GC with 2 thread(s)

Heap Configuration:
   MinHeapFreeRatio = 40
   MaxHeapFreeRatio = 70
   MaxHeapSize      = 536870912 (512.0MB)
   NewSize          = 178257920 (170.0MB)
   MaxNewSize       = 178257920 (170.0MB)
   OldSize          = 4194304 (4.0MB)
   NewRatio         = 2
   SurvivorRatio    = 8
   PermSize         = 16777216 (16.0MB)
   MaxPermSize      = 314572800 (300.0MB)

Heap Usage:
PS Young Generation
Eden Space:
   capacity = 145489920 (138.75MB)
   used     = 81242600 (77.4789810180664MB)
   free     = 64247320 (61.271018981933594MB)
   55.84070704004786% used
From Space:
   capacity = 16384000 (15.625MB)
   used     = 0 (0.0MB)
   free     = 16384000 (15.625MB)
   0.0% used
To Space:
   capacity = 16384000 (15.625MB)
   used     = 0 (0.0MB)
   free     = 16384000 (15.625MB)
   0.0% used
PS Old Generation
   capacity = 358612992 (342.0MB)
   used     = 358612992 (342.0MB)
   free     = 0 (0.0MB)
   100.0% used
PS Perm Generation
   capacity = 172621824 (164.625MB)
   used     = 172385280 (164.3994140625MB)
   free     = 236544 (0.2255859375MB)
   99.86296981776765% used

it’s how my heap space seems. It is remarkable that Old Generation and Perm Generation use ca 100% their spaces. But i had triggered GC manually several times. The question is how can i get the IDE to sweep these objects in old generation without starting the IDE? (After start up the memory usage is about 60MB -90 MB) how can i find out what these are? There are some threads running which can be watched in VisualVM like RMI TCP Connection, RMI TCP Accept , XML RPC Weblistener and so on, although i do nothing on IDE and they’re still consuming memory even 5-10 MBs per second.

$ uname -a
Linux bagdemir 2.6.32-28-generic #55-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jan 10 21:21:01 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

$ java --version 
java version "1.6.0_24"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_24-b07)
Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 19.1-b02, mixed mode)

UPDATE:
memory configuration:
-Xms256m -Xmx512m -Xmn170m -XX:MaxPermSize=300m

Answer 1

Right way to go is to get a memory snapshot and submit corresponding ticket to the JetBrains tracker with the snapshot attached.