为Tomcat分配更多内存不是正确的解决方案。

正确的解决方案是在销毁和重新创建上下文(热部署)之后进行清理。解决方案是停止内存泄漏。

如果Tomcat/Webapp服务器告诉您未能注销驱动程序(JDBC)，那么请注销它们。这将阻止内存泄漏。

您可以创建一个ServletContextListener并在web.xml中配置它。下面是一个示例ServletContextListener:

import java.sql.Driver;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.util.Enumeration;

import javax.servlet.ServletContextEvent;
import javax.servlet.ServletContextListener;

import org.apache.log4j.Logger;

import com.mysql.jdbc.AbandonedConnectionCleanupThread;

/**
 * 
 * @author alejandro.tkachuk / calculistik.com
 *
 */
public class AppContextListener implements ServletContextListener {

    private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(AppContextListener.class);

    @Override
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent arg0) {
        logger.info("AppContextListener started");
    }

    @Override
    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent arg0) {
        logger.info("AppContextListener destroyed");

        // manually unregister the JDBC drivers
        Enumeration<Driver> drivers = DriverManager.getDrivers();
        while (drivers.hasMoreElements()) {
            Driver driver = drivers.nextElement();
            try {
                DriverManager.deregisterDriver(driver);
                logger.info(String.format("Unregistering jdbc driver: %s", driver));
            } catch (SQLException e) {
                logger.info(String.format("Error unregistering driver %s", driver), e);
            }

        }

        // manually shutdown clean up threads
        try {
            AbandonedConnectionCleanupThread.shutdown();
            logger.info("Shutting down AbandonedConnectionCleanupThread");
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            logger.warn("SEVERE problem shutting down AbandonedConnectionCleanupThread: ", e);
            e.printStackTrace();
        }        
    }
}

然后在web.xml中进行配置:

<listener>
    <listener-class>
        com.calculistik.mediweb.context.AppContextListener 
    </listener-class>
</listener>  

App server PermGen errors that happen after multiple deployments are most likely caused by references held by the container into your old apps' classloaders. For example, using a custom log level class will cause references to be held by the app server's classloader. You can detect these inter-classloader leaks by using modern (JDK6+) JVM analysis tools such as jmap and jhat to look at which classes continue to be held in your app, and redesigning or eliminating their use. Usual suspects are databases, loggers, and other base-framework-level libraries.

参见类加载器泄漏:可怕的“java.lang。OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space”异常，特别是它的后续帖子。

目前最简单的答案是使用Java 8。

它不再专门为PermGen空间保留内存，允许PermGen内存与常规内存池混合。

请记住，您将必须删除所有非标准的-XXPermGen…JVM启动参数，如果你不想让Java 8抱怨它们什么都不做的话。

或者，你可以切换到JRockit，它处理permgen的方式不同于sun的jvm。它通常也有更好的性能。

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/jrockit/overview/index.html

我尝试了几个答案，最终完成工作的唯一一件事是在pom中的编译器插件的配置:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.3.2</version>
    <configuration>
        <fork>true</fork>
        <meminitial>128m</meminitial>
        <maxmem>512m</maxmem>
        <source>1.6</source>
        <target>1.6</target>
        <!-- prevent PermGen space out of memory exception -->
        <!-- <argLine>-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m</argLine> -->
    </configuration>
</plugin>

希望这一点能有所帮助。

First step in such case is to check whether the GC is allowed to unload classes from PermGen. The standard JVM is rather conservative in this regard – classes are born to live forever. So once loaded, classes stay in memory even if no code is using them anymore. This can become a problem when the application creates lots of classes dynamically and the generated classes are not needed for longer periods. In such a case, allowing the JVM to unload class definitions can be helpful. This can be achieved by adding just one configuration parameter to your startup scripts:

-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled

默认情况下，它被设置为false，因此要启用它，您需要显式地在Java选项中设置以下选项。如果你启用了CMSClassUnloadingEnabled, GC也会扫描PermGen并删除不再使用的类。请记住，此选项仅在UseConcMarkSweepGC也使用下面的选项启用时才有效。因此，当运行ParallelGC或串行GC时，请确保您已经通过指定将GC设置为CMS:

-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC