Maven, Java and Yet Another Memory Problem

Everyone working with Java has probably experienced an OutOfMemoryError at one time or another. Since the default values of the JVM are often ridiculously low (used to be 64MB for a standard JVM), increasing the value through startup options usually solved the problems.

Experienced users know that there are different kinds of OutOfMemory errors, the most common being 'Java heap space'. People playing with Tomcat and redeploying webapps a couple of times run into the 'PermGen space' variant pretty fast.

But recently we encountered yet another memory problem, which even resulted in a vm crash, with problems in libjvm.so. This was reproducible on our build server, where we also release new versions using the maven-release-plugin.

It seems that during the maven run within maven (when running mvn release:prepare) the reserved code cache memory area runs full. The documentation about -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize is a bit unclear on its workings:

Reserved code cache size (in bytes) - maximum code cache size. [Solaris 64-bit, amd64, and -server x86: 48m; in 1.5.0_06 and earlier, Solaris 64-bit and and64: 1024m.]

But it just so happens that increasing it to half a gigabyte fixed the problem for good.

I'm all for being able to configure the JVM in all ways imaginable, but being forced to control it just can't be the right way. To run the release plugin we now have to configure three different memory settings. Can't we have a maximum memory setting that limits heap, stack, permgen and code cache size?