Use of internal APIs to protect against memory leaks

[Mark Thomas]

All,

As you may know I am one of the Apache Tomcat committers. The Tomcat
project was approached recently[1] to see what, if any, internal APIs
Tomcat was using as part of the JDK 9 preparations.

My response was that the only place Tomcat does this is in the memory
leak prevention class [2]. I also commented that if the memory leaks
could be addressed then we'd have no need to us the internal API. The
response from Oracle was a suggestion to bring up these memory leaks on
this list.

The memory leaks stem from the generally more complex class loader
structure present in a JavaEE container than is typically present in a
standalone Java app.

At this point, I have two questions.

1. Is this community interested in examining these memory leaks further
to see what can be done in the JDK to avoid them?

2. If yes, would you prefer a discussion thread for each leak or one
thread for all leaks? Personally, I think a thread per leak would be
easier to manage but it might make sense just to look at one leak first
as there may well be some common themes that emerge which would save us
discussing them on each thread.

Mark

[1] http://tomcat.markmail.org/thread/n3n6arf3j7f27zhb

[2]
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/tomcat/trunk/java/org/apache/catalina/core/JreMemoryLeakPreventionListener.java?view=annotate