Yes, doing a lot of String, methods/classes operations can cause errors such as this and as you stated this occurs when there are a lot of variables being initialized. Below is a guide from sun on these errors. Also if they are attempting to use a lot of Strings and doing String operations they may try to use the "Stringbuilder" instead of String.

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/trouble/TSG-VM/html/memleaks.html#gbyuu

A permgen size of128M is a little small for JBoss AS (or an app server, for that matter). Try bumping it to 256M.

Alexander, doing a lot of String manipulations has no bearing on an OOME for permgen.

Alexander, please do not ask questions in a private message. You should have asked it here so that everyone can benefit from the discussion.

The article you referenced,\

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/trouble/TSG-VM/html/memleaks.html#gbyuu

talks about intered strings. That is literal strings defined or used in your application. If you create a new string that does not match an intered string, the new string is allocated in the heap, not in the permgen.

The permanent generation is used to store class objects and related meta data,

Try,

-XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m If the problem still persist,then its better to do a profiling and see what is the class which are making too many objects and why.

Thanks,

Ruchir