Using a stateful no-interface bean causes a memory leak in PermGen space. This can easily be reproduced by creating and removing such a bean. On my machine it fails after 22500 instances.

The problem is that for each instance of a bean a new Proxy-class is generated.

This is done using javassist framework in the class org.jboss.ejb3.proxy.javassist.JavassistProxyFactory in method createProxy(Class[], InvocationHandler). Here the depreciated javassist method (instance).setHandler(...) is used. Due to documentation (http://www.csg.is.titech.ac.jp/~chiba/javassist/html/javassist/util/proxy/ProxyFactory.html) this call deactivates the cache!

The solution is simply to remove that call and pass the handler right in the (instance).create(...) method.