> From: André Warnier [...@ice-sa.com] > would it not be easier to catch the OOM exception and then return a > "sorry, server overloaded" page to the browser ?
At that point, it's too late. A thread, somewhere in the system, tried to allocate some memory for an object and couldn't. This could happen anywhere! It might be while allocating the buffer to read the request, or the buffer to send the response, or even the socket instance from which to read the request. There are then no guarantees. You may be unable to send anything back to the client, as you may be unable to access the socket because the OOM was caused by trying to create that socket. Or the thread that got the exception might be one of the threads processing incoming requests. Once the system encounters an out-of-memory error, you pretty much have to stop the process and start again, as you generally have no idea what else has failed. You can't even save any outstanding work to file, as there's no guarantee you can allocate the memory for the file object - if MS Word runs out of memory, you just lost your document! This isn't unique to Java, by the way - if you want a coding nightmare, try to handle *all* malloc() fails in a reasonably sized C program. Or kalloc() calls in a kernel :-). When you realise that running out of memory means you can no longer guarantee to allocate any new memory for any purpose at all, the scale of the problem becomes apparent. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
