OOME is the acronym of the month. We've diagnosed the problems with the out of memory error. It turns out that many of the heavy lifting Java instances in the TOPAZ publishing application are session-scoped. What does this mean?!? For every user, a session is kept until a timeout period is reached, then it is assumed that the user is no longer visiting the site. The session is discarded and the Java garbage collection frees the held memory.

This was particularly problematic for the article XSL transformation of the XML to HTML. Each user was creating there own article XSL transform which was a) really really big and b) staying in memory for a really really long time. We've already changed the production settings so that sessions are kept for 10 minutes rather than a really really long time and this should have immediate impact on the garbage collection of the memory.

The developers are also changing each of the Java instances from session scope to request scope so they are only available as long as the requested object is available. We're testing the article XSL and preliminary results look promising.

More to follow as testing continues....