Spring Boot Memory Leak in Production – Debugging Guide
A memory leak in production can silently kill your application. In Spring Boot applications, memory leaks often appear as: Increasing heap usage Frequent Full GC Slow API responses OutOfMemoryError Pod restarts (Kubernetes) This guide explains how to detect, analyze, and fix memory leaks step by step. đź“Ś Symptoms of Memory Leak Common production signals: JVM heap constantly increasing GC pauses getting longer Application becomes slower over time Memory never returns to baseline after load đź–Ľ️ Example: Rising Heap Usage 4 If heap graph looks like a staircase climbing upward → likely memory leak. 🧠Step 1 – Confirm It’s Really a Leak Not every high memory usage is a leak. Check: Is memory released after GC? Does usage stabilize? Does it only happen under traffic spike? Enable GC logs: -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -Xloggc:gc.log If memory never drops after Full GC → suspect leak. 🧠Step 2 – Capture Heap Dump When memory is high: jmap -dump:live,format=b,file=heap.hp...