Tomcat 6 Web Application Eating Up Memory Over Time

I 开发者_JAVA百科have a Grails application that is deployed on a Tomcat 6 server. The application runs fine for a while ( a day or two), but slowly eats up more and more memory over time until it grinds to a halt and then surpasses the maximum value. Once I restart the container, everything is fine. I have been verifying this with the grails JavaMelody plugin as well as the Application Info plugin, but I need help in determining what I should be looking for.

It sounds like an application leak, but to my knowledge there is no access to any unmanaged resources. Also, the Hibernate cache seems to be in check. It looks like if I run the garbage collector I get a decent chunk of memory back, but I don't know how to do this sustainably.

So:

• How can I use these (or other) monitoring tools to figure out where the problem is?
• Is there any other advice that could help me?

Thanks so much.

EDIT

I am using Grails 1.3.7 and I am using the Quartz plugin.

You can use the VisualVM application in the Oracle JDK to attach to the Tomcat instance while running (if using Oracle JVM already) to inspect what goes on. The memory profiler can tell you quite a bit and point you in the right direction. You most likely look for either objects that grow or types of objects that get allocated more and more.

If you need more than the free VisualVM application can tell you, a commercial profiler may be useful.

Depending on your usage of Quartz it may be directly related to a know memory leak with the Quartz plugin with persistence and thread-local. You may want to double check and see if this applies to your situation.