Question

We have used the eclipse memory analyzer and it shows the following things in the heap. The heap snapshot has been attached. Could this cause a memory leak in the future?

I am not able to pin point which file exactly is causing so many objects to be retained on the heap. Can you please provide some insight on this? We are using a Java EE application with the spring framework along with a tomcat 5.5 server. The database used is mysql.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The stack doesn’t look particularly worrisome if you’d ask me.

The entries shown are created by the Spring framework and are used to increase its performance. Since Spring, like many other modern Java frameworks, uses reflection a lot to couple beans, inject stuff, apply configuration etc, it would be a little slow if all spring beans where inspected over and over again. Spring therefor caches the results of this inspection.

Also note that a WeakHashMap is being used, which has special properties with respect to garbage collection (read its Javadocs to learn more about this).