Process Died | Production

[Arnab Chakravarty <ac...@sapient.com>]

Hi all,

We have the following version being currently used in production:

- jdk1.4.2
- Tomcat 3.3
- Apache 1.3.27
- Solaris 8 (4 Cpu's, 4 GB Ram, 4GB Swap)
- Oracle 8
- 4 Machines running 3 tomcats each (12 Tomcats in all)

Problem:
A tomcat process died on our production dumping a core file of size 1Gb. The reasons are not known as what caused the same. We have specified the following setting for the JVM:

256K (min size)
778K (max size)

I would like to know, what happens when the JVM reaches the max heap size? Does it continue to run, I mean is there a point after which it cannot sustain any longer as it has no space allocated to do so ? When does it dump the core file, after encountering the some signal

I would also like to know if anyone in the list havent restarted their tomcats for months and are running their application smoothly (more importantly the JVM is kept alive for months).

It would also help if anyone can point to some useful resource which exaclty point to this problem / question. Moreover, anything else one should look for apart from code leaks in this case to sustain the Jvm for longer duration ?

Thanks in Advance, 
Arnab C