[WW-3402] StrutsSpringTestCase - Memory Leak

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.1.8
• Fix Version/s: 2.2.1
• Component/s: Unit Tests
• Labels: junit

Environment

Eclipse 3.5, Linux Fedora 10.

• Assignee: Lukasz Lenart
• Reporter: Carl Ballantyne
• Created: 09/Mar/10 14:13
• Updated: 28/Oct/12 22:11
• Resolved: 09/Mar/10 14:23

Description

I ran into an issue with the StrutsSpringTestCase class when doing my unit tests.
Basically the memory kept climbing until it crashed the machine.

This class is actually loading the applicationContext for every test case that extends
it. And because the applicationContext is static the instances of the spring beans loaded
are not cleaned up by the garbage collector. I could verify this by using JVisualVM and seeing the memory usage climb and by doing a heap dump and seeing the multiple instances of Spring beans.

What I ended up doing was overriding the method with the following in my base test class
for Struts 2. The only difference being the check to see if applicationContext is null.
This has the added benefit of speeding up the tests.

protected void setupBeforeInitDispatcher() throws Exception {
// only load beans from spring once
if (applicationContext == null)

{ GenericXmlContextLoader xmlContextLoader = new GenericXmlContextLoader(); applicationContext = xmlContextLoader.loadContext(getContextLocations()); }

servletContext.setAttribute(WebApplicationContext.ROOT_WEB_APPLICATION_CONTEXT_ATTRIBUTE,
applicationContext);
}

Maybe someone can update the repository with this.