It's a memory leak. The permenant generation fills up with class/method references which should be released when the classloader is undeployed. So either there are tests that are not undeploying their test artifacts from the server or there are still references to the classloader/classes somewhere. EJB3 has had a known issue recently. JBoss5 has a problem in the VFS layer (but I don't believe that is related to the permsize) which still needs to be sorted out. I don't see any reason why we can't bootstrap the server within 64M? This used to be possible. In fact, the basic ejb server in the 2.4.x days booted and ran in 4M. :-) It is only because people keep increasing the default memory to fix the testsuite that this "bloatware" problem is not being addressed. i.e. what is using/wasting all this memory. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4030310#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...