Possible to spin off independant JVM?

Question

I have a program (MyProgram) that displays a bunch of buttons that are associated with other Java programs. When a button is pressed, the classes needed to run that application are loaded (using URLClassLoader) and an invoke() is called on the main class of that application. This executes the selected application on the same JVM that MyProgram is running on.
Same-JVM execution is like one huge memory "leak": when one program on the JVM quits, not all of it's resources are reclaimed.
One proposed solution to this problem was to have MyProgram create a new JVM (different from the one it's running on) for the programs it launches to run on. Every 3rd program it would release the previous JVM (leaving it to run on it's own) and create a new one to run the next 3 launched programs on.
Is this possible? (If I'm not making sense, please let me know). Is there a better way to accomplish this task?

Answer 1

Do you want to run in one VM or not?I want to do exactly what I said in my post.
Originally we wanted everything running on one. Now,
faced with memory problems, we're looking into running
only 3-4 apps on one VM. The memory savings are
reduced, but the potential for leakage is reduced,
too.I have to apologize. Rereading your original post I realize that I kind of skimmed right over the third paragraph.
No matter how
you start another VM you will not save any memory.Running one VM for multiple apps will save memory, and
tests have borne this out: each VM requires an
incredible amount of overhead to run, so if you can
get more than one app onto a VM you've saved the
memory that would have been used to run the VM for
each app.Actually, this goes to the same careless reading. I thought you were imagining that starting one VM from another somehow consumed less resources than starting it from a shell. Guess I was tired.
In the world of Smalltalk that I come from, we did everything on a given machine in one VM, unless we were working on distributed aspects of our apps and we didn't want to use several machines. Every app was developed with that taken for granted, so we never had problems with apps conflicting. schapel's point was pretty good, and not something that would have occurred to me.
Your problems with
unreleased resources are very likely problems with
your own code, as Sun has fixed most of theresource
leaks in Swing.Actually, Sun informs us that they're working on the
same problem we are.Do you have even a rough idea where it is? I'd love to know to avoid it. But I guess if you knew you'd be avoiding it too - as it'd probably be less work than the pain you're going through now!
I recommend that you check out
http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=888/ddj0002l/0002l.htm
Will do!Good luck,
Ian