I'm using 1.6 for development purposes (I will change to JDK 7 very shortly, but it hasn't been possible until now for other reasons), and I am literally plagued by the PermGen problem every single day, perhaps up to 3 times an hour. Increasing PermGen space is not a solution, as it only means that - yes, it'll take longer for PermGen space to run out, but the Application Server (e.g. Glassfish) will become incredibly slow before it breaks.
Yes, doing a lot of redeploys. Restarting the server process takes a bit too long. E.g. if I have 50 EJB's and 20-30 JAX-RS type web services, it does take the application about 15-20 seconds to load each time. Sometimes even longer. So incremental redeploys are really great, as it usually takes 2-3 seconds instead.
>Luckily the new patches to Java 7 no longer have this problem. But as the different statistics show – vast majority of the applications out there have not migrated to Java 7 as we speak. So most often than not, your application at hand has got the very same problem waiting to surface.
It's a tad misleading, but it's "still out there waiting to bite you" because of Java 6 still being widely used.
We'll see if that EOL actually happens. It's pretty irresponsible to discontinue security updates for a version that is used by half of your customers (even if you don't want them to use it anymore.) Very similar to Microsoft and XP support.