Today, tomcat was slowing down significantly, so I checked the server and managed to make a memory dump just before Tomcat crashed completely. After some analysis of the dump we found the cause of what appeared to be a memory problem:

Two researchr templates - dblpView and dblpPapers - are infinitely calling each other through indirect recursion. As a result, Tomcat tries to infinitely nest template objects of classes dblpViewDBLP_Publication_Template and dblpPapersDBLP_Publication_Template. Consequently, Tomcat runs out of heap memory even before it runs out of stack space.

Most probably this is caused by an (indirect) recursion in cross references in DBLP and can be solved by adding additional stop criteria to the template recursion (such as a list of already presented publications and a maximum depth).

Submitted by Sander Vermolen on 11 May 2010 at 16:37

This particular problem seems to be solved, although server does run out of memory from time-to-time it seems.