What does "Total loaded" mean in VisualVM?

What does the graph labeled "Total loaded" under "Monitor->Classes" in VisualVM mean?

The reason I ask is because under a specific test case, the "Total loaded" graph is growing linearly but the memory (heap & permgen) remains stable.

A开发者_StackOverflow社区fter about 10 minutes of stress testing, VisualVM reports over 600.000 "loaded" classes. And only 450 that is "unloaded". The app is still responding at this point.

What does this really mean? Does it still count all classes that are cleared during GC runs? Are they different classes or different instances of classes?

"Total loaded" displays the total number of classes that have been loaded since the Java virtual machine has started execution.