This guy definitely deserves credit for focusing on the problem. Most java developers I know would have tried some cheezy workaround like periodically restarti

This guy definitely deserves credit for focusing on the problem. Most java developers I know would have tried some cheezy workaround like periodically restarting the process. As a consequence things like this go unsolved for years. This is actually a common issue whenever you have long-lived processes which suck in third-party code. Half the complaints I see about browsers these days is that they leak memory. I remember a similar problem in C++ years ago with a poorly coded initializer. One of the core dumps of an X application I looked into had over 50 megabytes of copies of the string "Helvetica".