(Preliminary) RFC 7038914: VM could throw uncaught OOME in ReferenceHandler thread

[Alan Bateman]

On 06/05/2013 09:02, Thomas Schatzl wrote:
> :
>
> Alan also mentioned something about instrumentation that can add memory
> allocations basically anywhere.
> As the reference handler code is plain java code, it will be affected as
> other java code.
I mentioned instrumentation on the off-chance that there was more to 
this puzzle.

I think Peter is right and the allocation of the InterruptedException 
seems to be the only place where OOME is possible in this code. Do you 
know if these tests call Thread.interrupt on random threads (maybe as a 
stress test)? It is possible to get a reference to the Reference Handler 
thread via Thread.getAllStackTraces and a few other APIs so maybe this 
what is going on. If the tests aren't calling interrupt on random 
threads then it suggests to me that there is something else going on, 
maybe there is a lurking VM bug.

In any case, it seems safe to catch/ignore OOME here. One of the mails 
mentioned ThreadDeath and I don't know if want to expand the scope of 
the patch. That seems a case where it should be like the Cleaner and 
terminate the VM.

-Alan.