ThreadLocal Memory Leak

PermGen exhaustions  in combination with  ThreadLocal  are often caused by  classloader leaks .

An example:  

Imagine an application server which has a pool of  worker threads .

They will be kept alive until application server termination.

A deployed web application uses a  static   ThreadLocal  in one of its classes in order to store some thread-local data, an instance of another class (lets call it  SomeClass ) of the web application. This is done within the worker thread (e.g. this action originates from a  HTTP request ).

Important:

By definition , a reference to a  ThreadLocal   value  is kept until the "owning" thread dies or if the ThreadLocal itself is no longer reachable.

If the web application  fails to clear the reference  to the  ThreadLocal   on shutdown , bad things will happen:

Because the worker thread will usually never die and the reference to the  ThreadLocal  is static, the  ThreadLocal  value  still references  the instance of  SomeClass , a web application's class -  even if the web application has been stopped!

As a consequence, the web application's  classloader cannot be garbage collected , which means that  all classes  (and all static data) of the web application  remain loaded  (this affects the PermGen memory pool as well as the heap).

Every redeployment iteration of the web application will increase permgen (and heap) usage. 

=> This is the permgen leak