Analysis on JDK-8022321 java/lang/ref/OOMEInReferenceHandler.java fails intermittently

[Peter Levart]

On 01/17/2014 02:13 PM, Peter Levart wrote:
>>> // Fast path for cleaners
>>> boolean isCleaner = false;
>>> try {
>>>   isCleaner = r instanceof Cleaner;
>>> } catch (OutofMemoryError oome) {
>>>   continue;
>>> }
>>>
>>> if (isCleaner) {
>>>   ((Cleaner)r).clean();
>>>   continue;
>>> }
>>>
>>
>> Hi David, Kalyan,
>>
>> I've caught-up now. Just thinking: is "instanceof Cleaner" throwing 
>> OOME as a result of loading the Cleaner class? Wouldn't the above 
>> code then throw some error also in ((Cleaner)r) - the checkcast, 
>> since Cleaner class would not be successfully initialized? 
>
> Well, no. The above code would just skip Cleaner processing in this 
> situation. And will never be doing it again after the heap is freed... 
> So it might be good to load and initialize Cleaner class as part of 
> ReferenceHandler initialization to ensure correct operation... 

Well, yes and no. Let me try once more:

Above code will skip Cleaner processing if the 1st time "instanceof 
Cleaner" is executed, OOME is thrown as a consequence of full heap while 
loading and initializing the Cleaner class. The 2nd time the "instanceof 
Cleaner" is executed after such OOME, the same line would throw 
NoClassDefFoundError as a consequence of referencing a class that failed 
initialization. Am I right?

Regards, Peter