I just came across an interesting article by Mike Schierberl that shows that locally scoped variables in your application may not be cleaned up the garbage collection at the end of the request as expected and may persist in memory.
Memory Leaks: Part II - variables scope leak
Mike has also provided some handy information on how to profile your application and identify such memory leaks.
ColdFusion Memory Leaks: Part I - profiler introduction
This certainly explains a lot of problems where your application has been eating memory like a fat guy in a cake shop for no reason and I will certainly take note of this issue in my own coding from now on. Unfortunately I don't think it will help me too much on a day to day basis at CFMXHosting as I deal with servers containing hundreds of sites, and I don;t think I could identify this problem for each and every clients site, that would be a lot of profiling.
NOTE: This problem appears to related to a JVM bug and will probably only effect people using the same JVM version as Mike. Upgrading your JVM to a new version should cure this issue.
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