by John Boyland.
An ``out of memory'' error can be catastrophic for a program, especially one written in a language such as Java that uses memory allocation frequently. Handling such an error can easily lead to its re-occurrence. A handler will often need memory while it is freeing resources (by persisting data to secondary storage, or clearing caches). A simple technique involves pre-allocating a large chunk of memory that is then freed at the start of the handler. I report some experience using this technique and discuss some of the problems that arise when reasoning about the behavior of memory error handlers.
@inproceedings(boyland:05out-of-memory,
title = {Position Paper: Handling ``Out Of Memory'' Errors},
author = {John Boyland},
booktitle = {ECOOP 2005 Workshop on Exceptional Handling in
Object-Oriented Systems},
month = jul,
year = 2005,
editor = {Anand Tripathi},
nothing = {})
A PDF preprint is available here. The slides for the presentation are also available.
Last Modified: August 1, 2005
Handling ``Out of Memory'' Errors / boyland@cs.uwm.edu