Should I increase the size of the permanent generation in the client vm?
This will always be a judgment call. In general increasing the size of a generation (and this applies not just to the permanent generation) can reduce the incidence of a wide variety of problems However, this may cause other processes to excessively page and/or garbage collect or throw out-of-memory exceptions. There are two failure modes to consider. When raising MaxPermSize, it is possible that previously well behaved programs that used to garbage collect to recover the permanent generation space will die by endless paging. For the permanent generation this usually only happens with the heavy interning of temporary strings. The other failure mode is that address space must be reserved for the permanent generation and this will reduce that available for the rest of the heap (the maximum -Xmx may then be too large). This will cause programs configured to use all available space to fail at initialization. Permanent generation defaults in recent VM’s.
