Hibernate v2.3.0. MySQL v5.0.18. WinXP SP2. Building bidirectional many-to-many, two tables plus mapping table. After approximately 100 objects, each additional object added in a given transaction results in reducing approximately 1% of the 60MB heap. Heap goes to zero, OutOfMemoryException occurs. These are not large objects, neither table. Have taken jmap and crash heap dumps. Analyzed with jhat. Nothing extraordinary. jhat not terribly helpful in that it doesn't show aggregate memory usage of any class. Any obvious cause of this heap exhaustion? Thanks.

Update to the above.

When lazy loading is used, the heap exhaustion is almost eliminated. It appears that non-lazy loading causes Hibernate to consume heap at a pace that exhausts "normal" heap sizes.

Thanks for all the help from the Hibernate team! This kind of support is what makes open source products so easy to use!