Howdy,

>A tomcat process died on our production dumping a core file of size
1Gb.
>The reasons are not known as what caused the same. We have specified
the
>following setting for the JVM:
>
>256K (min size)
>778K (max size)

Are you sure that's K?  Assuming you really mean M, how did you arrive
at a number like 778?  Maybe you mean 768?

>I would like to know, what happens when the JVM reaches the max heap
size?

If the JVM cannot allocate any more system memory to heap because -Xmx
is reaches, it will try full garbage collections frequently.  If those
don't reclaim much/any memory, ie the heap is full and referenced, you
will get java.lang.OutOfMemoryErrors.  You'll be able to see them in
logs/catalina.out.  However, the JVM won't crash for a long long time
even while these are occurring.  It'll thrash at a high CPU usage, and
you will start getting random NullPointerExceptions throughout your code
because referenced variables might be swapped out.  But it won't crash
with a core dump as you're describing.

>Does it continue to run, I mean is there a point after which it cannot
>sustain any longer as it has no space allocated to do so ? When does it
>dump the core file, after encountering the some signal

Internal crashes, not OufOfMemoryErrors, cause core dumps.

>I would also like to know if anyone in the list havent restarted their
>tomcats for months and are running their application smoothly (more
>importantly the JVM is kept alive for months).

Yes: we have numerous applications that have been running for more
months now, including one that's been running tomcat 4.1.24 since it
came out without stopping ;)

>It would also help if anyone can point to some useful resource which
>exaclty point to this problem / question. Moreover, anything else one
>should look for apart from code leaks in this case to sustain the Jvm
for
>longer duration ?

Yeah: core dumps frequently indicate a mismatch between the JVM and the
OS.  Look for missing OS patches or an upgraded JVM.  Beyond that, I
don't use tomcat 3.x nor an Apache front-end so I can't offer much
specific help there.

Yoav Shapira



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