Nope, interned strings are no longer in PermGen since "forever" http://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6962931. Also if you really care about this you'd likely be better of running Java 8u20 or later which automatically deduplicates Strings.

Reasons for running with -XX:MaxPermSize=1G that I can imagine:

  * you run Java 7 (which goes EOL in March)
  * and one of those:
    * your code base is twice as large as Eclipse and JBoss combined
    * you have a PermGen leak
    * you have no idea what you're doing