I'm debugging a fairly large project I've been working on (but did not originally create) and I've noticed that sometimes it crashes with an OutOfMemoryError. The code is loading a lot of data from files so this isn't entirely surprising in general.
However, what confuses me is that I'm using VisualVM 1.3.4 to profile the program, and it behaves inconsistently. Most times I've run it, the heap gradually expands up to about 2GB (the computer has 16GB of RAM; it's for academic research) with the used heap spiking higher and higher underneath it. Around 2GB, it will crash. The program isn't proccessing more information as time goes on though, so it shouldn't grow the heap to 2GB in just a few minutes.
Sometimes, though, I get a sudden crash after about 30 seconds, with a heap size of 250MB and only about 100MB in use. How am I getting a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space if my heap isn't full?
Edit: I'm using Eclipse to run the program, and I have the VisualVM plugin so it gets launched automatically. Also, I'm using Java 7.
Turned out the crash was caused by using the OpenJDK JRE rather than Oracle's JRE. I don't know exactly what the bug is in OpenJDK that makes it crash like this, but changing to Oracle's JRE ultimately solved the problem.
(I was using OpenJDK because I'm on a Linux computer that someone was using for open-source work before me. When I mentioned the crash to him he had the idea that that might be the cause. He was right.)