Garbage Collection

[gayatri ganesh]

Hi,
This is a line from K&B book

"About the only thing you can guarantee is that if you
are running very low on memory, the garbage collector will run before it throws an OutOfMemoryException."

So a java program never throws an OutOfMemoryException. Is this correct ?

Thanks

Gayatri

[Tony Morris]

That's not quite true.
The guarantee that is made is that there will be no objects available for garbage collection at the time an OOME is thrown. I'll find the spec. reference next Tuesday for you

[Nicholas Cheung]

Just think about the case that the program keeps creating objects with non-null value inside an infinite loop, it finally caused OutOfMemoryException as there is NO de-referenced objects to be collected.

Nick

[Tony Morris]

As a point to note, java.lang.OutOfMemoryError implies a VM fatal condition, however, the VM is not actually of memory - only an allocation failed.
Consider the following. The VM has 2 bytes of memory remaining, an attempt to allocate 3 bytes is made and it fails with a OOME, however, the application could otherwise continue running normally. This is not a fatal condition.