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Busting PermGen Myths

In my latest post I explained the reasons that can cause the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space crashes. Now it is time to talk about possible solutions to the problem. Or, more precisely, about what the Internet suggests for possible solutions. Unfortunately, I can only say that I felt my inner Jamie Hyneman from MythBusters awakening when going through the different "expert opinions" on the subject.

I googled for current common knowledge about ways to solve java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space crashes and went through a couple dozen pages that seemed more appropriate in Google results. Fortunately, most of the suggestions have already been distilled into this topic of the very respected StackOverflow. As you can see, the topic is truly popular and has some quite highly voted answers. But the irony is that the whole topic contains exactly zero solutions I could recommend myself. 

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Spring Cache: Profiling

At Plumbr, we're constantly working on how software can be made faster and more reliable. The promise we've made to our customers is to avoid 100 million failures and save 100 million hours for their users per year.

While we're making things better for engineers around the world, we're also improving our software. Recently, I invested time in tuning the performance of one particular part of the Plumbr codebase. It is quite a tight loop, reading data from Kafka, performing several computations, and then writing data to a file. After several rounds of optimization, an unexpected code path started appearing on the profiler output.