java.lang.OutOfMemoryError (Help?)

[Danny Angus]

Error: 500
Location: /
Internal Servlet Error:
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError


Can anyone help me, I'm new to tomcat, fairly new to java too, but have been
doing the apache/perl thing for too long...

Why wont my servlets memory be being re-cycled?

I have variously, installed the latest builds, removed session interceptors,
reduced session ttl to 2 minutes, removed almost all of the "new" statements
in my servlet, exlicitly close()'d all output streams, explicitly return'ed
from all calls.

Still my used memory creeps up until I get the above error.

linux (redhhat6)
sun jre  (j2re-1_3_0_02-linux)
also exhibits behaviour under IBM jre (IBMJava2-JRE-13)
Tomcat jakarta-tomcat-3.3-m2