Spring web thread using a lot of memory

Webflow application (2.3.1) requires a lot of memory for each new stream that we open through the browser.

The screenshot below shows our application memory usage. When the application starts up, it takes an initial 400 MB. After that, we open 4 individual identical Webflow TEST pages in the browser, each of which requires about 90 MB of additional memory.

Each test page starts from its own simple flow definition:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<flow xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow
                                  http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow/spring-webflow-2.0.xsd" start-state="start"> 
    <view-state id="start" view="test/test1">
    </view-state>
    <end-state id="end"/>
    <bean-import resource="../flow-beans.xml"/>
</flow>

      

        
        
        
      

    

JSP test pages are also very basic, just blank with one line of text.

When we currently set the JVM memory to 1.5 GB, the application will end up crashing on the server with OutOfMemoryExceptions after opening about 15 different threads. 1.5 Gb seems a bit big considering the low complexity of the screens.

We are wondering if we expect the amount of Webflow Web resources for these simple streams / pages and if we should just assign more memory to the server JVM. If not, we would like to know how we can reduce the use of this memory.

Below is the whole web stream configuration.

We tried to add the run-repository-repository tag and played with the max-snapshot and max-execution values, but even the most conservative settings don't change the memory usage we see.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:webflow="http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow-config"
    xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow-config
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow-config/spring-webflow-config-2.3.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx 
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd">

    <!-- Launches new flow executions and resumes existing executions. -->

    <webflow:flow-executor id="flowExecutor" flow-registry="flowRegistry">
    </webflow:flow-executor>

    <bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
        <property name="location" value="classpath:our.properties" />
        <property name="placeholderPrefix" value="$xxxx"></property>
    </bean>

    <tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="$xxxx{txManager}" />

    <!-- Creates the registry of flow definitions for this application -->
    <webflow:flow-registry id="flowRegistry" flow-builder-services="flowBuilderServices">
        <webflow:flow-location-pattern value="classpath:flows/**/*-flow.xml" />
    </webflow:flow-registry>

    <bean id="viewFactoryCreator" class="org.springframework.webflow.mvc.builder.MvcViewFactoryCreator">
        <property name="viewResolvers" ref="viewResolver" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="expressionParser" class="org.springframework.expression.spel.standard.SpelExpressionParser">
        <constructor-arg name="configuration">
          <bean class="org.springframework.expression.spel.SpelParserConfiguration">
            <constructor-arg name="autoGrowCollections" value="true" />
            <constructor-arg name="autoGrowNullReferences" value="false" />
          </bean>
        </constructor-arg>
    </bean>

    <bean id="webflowExpressionParser" class="org.springframework.webflow.expression.spel.WebFlowSpringELExpressionParser">
        <constructor-arg name="expressionParser" ref="expressionParser" />
    </bean>

    <webflow:flow-builder-services id="flowBuilderServices" view-factory-creator="viewFactoryCreator" validator="validator" expression-parser="webflowExpressionParser"/>

    <bean id="validator" class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean" />


    <bean id="projectVersion" class="our.company.versions.ProjectVersionUtil">
        <property name="xxxxVersion" value="$xxxx{xxxx.version}" />
        <property name="systemConfigurationDao">    
            <ref bean="SystemConfigurationDao"/>
        </property>
    </bean>

</beans>