I'm looking at a similar potential issue for a Linux OS. I only have a small amount of memory avaiable and I'm concerned that the Java process will grow beyond that (128MB) and then die.
I have used JProfiler for looking at the heap and it is all fine. I don't exhuste the heap at any time and the application has been running for 2 weeks without any memory errors.
You mention that it isn't necessarily a leak, but I don't understand why the growth in the java process happens. At the moment I'm trying create a picture of the growths over time to see is it slows down or what. I would be very interrested in finding out if there are any clues to it stopping before the entire avaiable memory is used up.
Is this normal behaviour and is it maybe related to how the specific JVM implementation deals with memory mamagment internally? (I'm using the HotSpot 1.5 from Sun)
Thanks
Thomas
[ August 19, 2007: Message edited by: Thomas Lagoni Olsen ]