They way it is at the moment, PoP Project may have a memory leak. Since it is my baby, I can't let it out to the world unless I know the leak is either not present, or properly resolved. So I and my team have begun profiling the code heavily, trying different profilers. So far I have tried JBoss Profiler and Profiler4j (open source), and Murali, a senior member of my team, has tried YourKit's java profiler (commercial).

I am a firm believer in all things open source but so far JBoss Profiler has not been very friendly for a first time profiler. Now I am battling things out with Profiler4J, which seems to be a bit nicer, but has yet to give me anything useful.

On the other hand, using YourKit's java profiler's evaluation version, twelve hours ago Murali located a section of our logic that has a high probability of causing a memory leak (something associated with objects stored in the http session). This is a big reason why open source will still take some time before the mainstream will accept it. A good deal of open source software is still not written for ease of use. As more open source development teams realize that people have to like the interface before they appreciate the functionality, more users will be willing to switch to free over paid. Until then we have open source softwares like Ubuntu (Linux for humans) to show the way.