error 500 on server

Hello I am new to my job. The server is throwing an exception all of a sudden.

Do you have any recommendations on how I should adjust the heap space on the environment variable? Or do you think a server reboot would do it?

This is a description of the error:

HTTP Status 500 -

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type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

javax.servlet.ServletException: Filter execution threw an exception

root cause

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

note The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Apache Tomcat/5.5.17 logs.

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Apache Tomcat/5.5.17

Increasing the heap size would be one way to possibly fix this. However you should try and figure out what is causing the JVM to run out of memory. It could happen in DEV environments where apps are deployed often, so in those cases just restarting the app server would be fine. If this is a PROD environment, you should try and look at the source code where the exeption originates from and figure out why so much memory is being used, for instance large Collections or Maps, large Resultsets, etc. etc. In many cases, fixing the code (i.e. by properly scoping objects) can prevent situations where you run out of memory.