Grails and Tomcat 7: Out of Memory (PermGen)

Deploying a Grails application to Tomcat 7 for the first time you may encounter the following error:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

Assumption: Windows Service

To correct the problem, just adjust the default memory and Perm Gen space allocated in Tomcat 7.

Start the service config tool "tomcat7w.exe:

Change the Java Options:

Switch to the Java tab:

• Change the “Initial Memory pool” to 128
• Change the “Maximum memory pool”  to 512

Perm Gen settings: 

Add the follow two lines to the Java options

--XX:PermSize=256m

--XX:MaxPermSize=265m

  

Restart the service.
Test your application

References:

• http://www.grails.org/FAQ
• http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/windows-service-howto.html