To understand the cause for the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space, we would need to understand what this specific memory area is used for.

For practical purposes, the permanent generation consists mostly of class declarations loaded and stored into PermGen. This includes the name and fields of the class, methods with the method bytecode, constant pool information, object arrays and type arrays associated with a class and Just In Time compiler optimizations.

From the above definition you can deduce that the PermGen size requirements depend both on the number of classes loaded as well as the size of such class declarations. Therefore we can say that the main cause for the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space is that either too many classes or too big classes are loaded to the permanent generation.