Java HotSpot Virtual Machine

The environment: 64bit Slackware Linux, Java Hotspot 64 Bit server VM (build 14.3-b01, mixed mode), Tomcat 6.0.20

JAVA_OPTS "-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=368m -XX:MaxPermSize=368m"

Periodically, the Tomcat (and the JVM) will just disappear (sometimes once in 10 days, sometimes several times an hour.) There is nothing in the Tomcat catalina.out and nothing in any error log that I can find.

The application has been running several years on an older 32 bit machine running Slackware 12.

Until today, I thought it was unrelated to load but today was quite heavy processing and the server repeatedly failed. It appears the failures have something to do with garbage collection although I can say that with absolute certainty. The two data points that lead me in that direction are 1) the failures have occurred on separate servers with entirely different processors but the same operating system and software (Java and Tomcat), 2) once, I forced a GC and a few minutes later the system failed (until today, I thought the two events were unrelated) and 3) today was the heaviest processing day we have ever had and would have forced many GC's (we update and restart the servers in the middle of the night.)

I have tried different flavors of Linux (Slackware and Suse.)

The failures stop Tomcat cleanly enough that the ports Tomcat listens on are released... I can restart Tomcat without a server reboot.

Anyone have any ideas?

TIA,

Carl