Unfinalized objects exhausting memory

Question

We're running a Jersey (1.x) based service in Tomcat on AWS in an array of ~20 instances Periodically an instance "goes bad": over the course of about 4 hours its heap and CPU usage increase until the heap is exhausted and the CPU is pinned. At that point it gets automatically removed from the load balancer and eventually killed.

Examining heap dumps from these instances, ~95% of the memory has been used up by an instance of java.lang.ref.Finalizer which is holding onto all sorts of stuff, but most or all of it is related to HTTPS connections sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnectionImpl, sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl, various crypto objects). These are connections that we're making to an external webservice using Jersey's client library. A heap dump from a "healthy" instance doesn't indicate any sort of issue.

Under relatively low load instances run for days or weeks without issue. As load increases, so does the frequency of instance failure (several per day by the time average CPU gets to ~40%).

Our JVM args are:

-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Xmx1024m -Xms1024m

I'm in the process of adding JMX logging for garbage collection metrics, but I'm not entirely clear what I should be looking for. At this point I'm primarily looking for ideas of what could kick off this sort of failure or additional targets for investigation.

Answer 1

This ultimately turned out to be caused by a JVM bug (unfortunately I've lost the link to the specific one we tracked it down to). Upgrading to a newer version of OpenJDK (we ended up with OpenJDK 1.7.0_50) solved the issue without us making any changes to our code.

Answer 2

Java uses a single finalizer thread to clean up dead objects. Your machine's symptoms are consistent with a pileup of backlogged finalizations. If the finalizer thread slows down too much (because some object takes a long time to finalize), the resulting accumulation of finalizer queue entries could cause the finalizer thread to fall further and further behind the incoming objects until everything grinds to a halt.

You may find profiling useful in determining what objects are slowing the finalizer thread.

Answer 3

Is it possibly a connection leak? I'm assuming you have checked for that?

I've had similar issues with GC bugs. Depending on your JVM version is looks like you are using an experimental (and potentially buggy) feature. You can try disabling G1 and use the default garbage collector. Also depending on your version, you might be running into a garbage collection overhead where it bails and doesn't properly GC stuff because it is taking too long to calculate what can and can't be trashed. The -XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit might help if available in your JVM.