Needing to gather some details to help answer a question regarding JVM memory and the the distinctions of Perm Space. I thought it might be helpful to post the links of what I thought were incredibly great posts from the past... It is now 2009 and the best posts on this matter appear to come from 2006. Hmm.... perhaps there has been a JDK release in some time :)

On the subject of; the reason the permanent space exists. Jon explains the details of instances of objects and their dependencies on instances of classes and the need for their order as it relates to garbage collection. He also discussions the klassKlass... interesting stuff.

On the subject of String intern, XML parsing and it's effect on Perm Space. haakon or what I assume to be Jenny details the effect of String.intern() and how an out of memory can occur. She does a great job of explaining their troubleshooting approach.

And my favorite book on the JVM spec is Inside the JVM. It turns out there are free chapters of this on the web now and chapter 5 is the chapter detailing the taxonomy of the JVM memory space.

The weakest coverage of any subject based on my searches, is the subject of root sets. Brian Goetz's article on Java Theory and Practice is rock solid.