PermGen errors in Jenkins

The one setting that really matters for PermGen space errors is (and it must be this exactly):

-XX:MaxPermSize=512m

One dash, two Big Xs, Big-M, Big-P, Big-S, no-spaces, size-in-megs, lower case m. If you screw it up it will be ignored. 99% of all the PermGen fixes I see that "don't work" are because someone didn't follow instructions precisely and used a Big-M for megabytes instead of a little-m, or put two dashes in front instead of one for example.

Also, 512 megs is just a starting point... adjust to fit your system.

I once experienced similar errors: jenkins was executing maven builds, which included surefire tests execution. I discovered that the version of maven I was using (V2 something) did not pass my JVM memory options to the surefire process fork, and some tests were failing because of this. MAVEN_OPTS, JAVA_OPTS, none did work.

I ended up passing my memory options directly in the settings.xml, and the PermGen errors were gone.

Here are the options I used (the app was fairly big):

-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m

Completely untested suggestion, but this answer suggests using -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled when starting Tomcat (albeit for an issue in a completely different context). This answer, however, suggests that CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled is unnecessary on Java 6 and that -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC must be used for CMSClassUnloadingEnabled to be effective.

At the very least -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled may do the trick assuming that the underlying issue is caused by classes being unnecessarily maintained in the PermGen space for your Tomcat instance.