Spring ApplicationContext taking up grotesque amounts of memory

Question

I have numerous Spring Framework-based applications that run on a Tomcat 5.5 server. Some of them have their own instances, some share a server with other applications. The one thing they all have in common is that they require huge amounts of memory, more than I think they should really require. Are there any tools out there for profiling Tomcat servers ?

To further elaborate, these run on Ubuntu 9.04, fully patched, with access to 3 GB of memory (about half of which it actually takes up).

Answer 1

There's a fair few Java profiling tools:

• JConsole (free)
• YourKit (commercial)
• JProfiler (commercial)

You just need to attach the profiler to the JVM on startup.

You could also take a look at Lamba probe, but it's more for monitoring:

http://www.lambdaprobe.org/d/index.htm

Also take a look at:

Open Source Java Profilers

Answer 2

Take a look at JConsole. Tomcat by itself exposes a lot of info via JMX as well.

That said, 1.5GB for an application may not be that grotesque. Depending on the application, of course - if it's a "Hello World", then you've got problems :-)