I'm running a GWT+Hibernate app on Glassfish 3.1. After a few hours, I run out of Permgen space. This is without any webapp reloads. I'm running with –XX:MaxPermSize=256m –XmX1024m.
I took the advice from this page, and found that I'm leaking tons of classes- all of my Hibernate models and all of my GWT RequestFactory proxies.
The guide referenced above says to "inspect the chains, locate the accidental reference, and fix the code". Easier said than done.
The classloader always points back to an instance of org.glassfish.web.loader.WebappClassLoader. Digging further, I find lots of references from $Proxy135 and similar-named objects. But I don't know how else to follow through.
I "solved" this by moving to Tomcat.