title: PS Old Gen is full and my application slows down
body: <p>During medium user load, my Tomcat application slows down very much and I am forced to restart Tomcat in order to permit users to work.</p>
  
  <p>The specs of the system are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Centos 5.4 64bit with 8GB RAM</li>
  <li>Tomcat 6</li>
  <li>A Bonita BPM webapp - which utilizes many Groovy calls / scripts</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The system is running just the Tomcat, no DB or anything else.</p>
  
  <p>When the application turns REALLY slow, a snapshot of the java memory is shown <a href="http://i49.tinypic.com/1572iar.png" rel="nofollow">here</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Have you any ideas to help me fine tune the java memory parameters to help the system work?
  The current memory ops in Tomcat are these:</p>
  
  <pre><code>MEMORY_OPTS="-Xshare:auto -Xms3072m -Xmx6144m -XX:MaxPermSize=1536m"`
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Should I use <code>-XX: UseCompressedOops</code> or any other parameter to prevent this memory exhaustion?</p>