In the Hibernate Manual you can see this example
Session session = sessionFactory.openSession();
Transaction tx = session.beginTransaction();
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
Customer customer = new Customer(...);
session.save(customer);
if (i % 20 == 0) { // 20, same as the JDBC batch size
// flush a batch of inserts and release memory:
session.flush();
session.clear();
}
}
tx.commit();
session.close();
Without the call to the flush method, your first-level cache would throw an OutOfMemoryException