The Dreaded PermGen Error

[Peter Schober]

* Christopher Bongaarts <cab at umn.edu> [2013-11-11 19:29]:
> Never restart the IdP app or context by itself - always do a full
> restart of Tomcat.  (I think I heard that this will no longer be
> required in IdP 3.)

That's the key here, though it's unclear the OP did this from his post
("stop/start the Shibboleth IdP" could either be the context or the
container).
Though I wouldn't go as far as "never" two handful of context restarts
could do it, when I still did that years ago.

The "If it hurts don't do that" advice of course to not restart the
container (or context) to make config changes active, but to structure
your environment and test environment in a way that you can be sure to
have working/valid config, and then confiure autoreloading of relevant
config files.
E.g. in the early years I still had many changes to the
attribute-resolver.xml and so autoreloaded that, say, once a day.
attribute-filter.xml could be reloaded more often (as long as you find
acceptable waiting for the changes to become active, e.g. 15 min or 2h
or whatever), assuming more changes happen there.

If you find yourself restarting because of changes to
relying-party.xml you should probably restructure your confing in a
way that works without changes to that file, pleny of comments on that
in the archives. Reloading that file automatically can often be
avoided.
-peter