In a caching class (Java 8) i have the following definition of a cache:

private static volatile LinkedHashMap<String, MyCacheItem> CACHE = null;

The size is limited to 4000 entries (guaranteed by implementing the removeEldestEntry() method of the LinkedHashMap.

While this limiting aspect works fine, i see this when taking a memory dump (hprof) of the JVM:

This all looks good, one LinkedHashMap$Entry one after the other.

However suddenly there appear other elements under CACHE:

Can somebody explain why other data is suddenly appearing under CACHE? I did not expect that.