We have had app teams whose Spring Boot application leaks memory at a rate that meant we needed to do app restarts once a month, even once a fortnight on occasion. Investigation is then hampered by half of the conversations we have being along the lines of "well we're using Spring Boot so it can't be our problem" and the other half are "it's Spring Boot causing the leak."

The dev team refused to accept responsibility as though they hadn't fought tooth and nail to use Spring Boot in the first place.

Just curious how you're measuring the memory leak in this case? Can you explain how that's being determined?

We monitor just about every aspect of the machines and JVMs that we own. When the Heap graph climbs steadily over days/weeks at a time, i.e. each GC still results in considerably more overall memory usage.

I read that as more of a criticism of the ORM/JPA and maybe xml than Spring Boot. In practice it's easy to pull down half the database with an errant "eagerly loaded" collection or attempt to deserialize a giant xml document into an in memory DOM, both of which can exhaust memory and hang jvms with very little information on what happened than an 'out of memory' exception.