One of the reasons it's so fragile, specially when the storage heap is larger than 16MiB, it's because gvm"launcher" is not waiting for gvm to completely die before allowing the user to launch another gvm instance.

Try it: just keep top open. Close gvm, and you'll see it stays alive for at least 10 seconds. Launch gvm while the "older" gvm is still closing and watch your files disappear.