Hi all, I have problem where I believe that Hibernate (using it with JPA :( ), is holding onto entities way too long.

Essentially this is the situation problem:

I have process, that needs to pull out a crap load of records (entities) from the database and update them all in one transaction. I have added paging logic so that it only pulls out one hundred at a time., captures the IDs of these of entities, and issue a sql native update for those objects..i.e. I do not modify the entity directly (i.e. hoping that Hibernate will unload it from its internal caching state).

From what I can tell, the entity reference count continues to climb regardless (based on visualVM), until the vm finally runs out of memory.

So..I am assuming that Hibernate/Caching is the culprit (an indeed in VisualVM, the references indecate it hibernate that holding the references). So I believe I need to either 'disable caching for this session/transaction (not even sure if that is possible), or potentially manually evict every entity pulled back. (this feels like it should not be needed as I would assume hibernate would/should only hold weak references to the entities, unless they become dirty?)

Does that sound correct? or am I missing something?

ps. psuedo code is:


Any feed back greatly appreciated.

Dan

after some more poking around, I found this:

EntityManager.clear(); // removes all entities from the current session.

as such changing the code above to (fixed the problem). still feels like the GC should have been able to free up these entities, instead of me being required to force the session to release it references.