Anybody experienced permgen memory leak [JENKINS-33358]?

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Christian Lague

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Mar 10, 2016, 1:08:32 PM3/10/16

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As per https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-33358 we experienced some severe issues due to permgen memory leaks. This seems to be related to use of Groovy, which is quite concerning given the use of it with Jenkins (e.g. pipeiline plugin). This seems to be a serious issue but we have not seen any other related issues. Anybody experienced the same?

James Nord

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Mar 10, 2016, 2:57:02 PM3/10/16

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Firstly upgrade to Java8 to get rid of the PermGen :)

Secondly as this is permgen this sound like dynamic classes that are created for groovy may not getting disposed correctly so have some references somewhere - so I would use Java8 and get a heap dump and investigate from there.

Something like the following should help for the java options when you start Jenkins.

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -XX:HeapDumpPath=/disk2/dumps

I've seen memory issues in plugins that are fine in 99% of the installations that use them but that in 1% use them in a way that causes them to bloat memory - so don;t worry if no one else has seen it.

Also - what are your memory options on the JVM - it may be its not leaking at all - but that the headroom is just too low (the defaults from Java are too low for anything other than a simple installation)