language agnostic - Is "Out Of Memory" A Recoverable Error?

Question

I've been programming a long time, and the programs I see, when they run out of memory, attempt to clean up and exit, i.e. fail gracefully. I can't remember the last time I saw one actually attempt to recover and continue operating normally.

So much processing relies on being able to successfully allocate memory, especially in garbage collected languages, it seems that out of memory errors should be classified as non-recoverable. (Non-recoverable errors include things like stack overflows.)

What is the compelling argument for making it a recoverable error?

Answer 1

It really depends on what you're building.

It's not entirely unreasonable for a webserver to fail one request/response pair but then keep on going for further requests. You'd have to be sure that the single failure didn't have detrimental effects on the global state, however - that would be the tricky bit. Given that a failure causes an exception in most managed environments (e.g. .NET and Java) I suspect that if the exception is handled in "user code" it would be recoverable for future requests - e.g. if one request tried to allocate 10GB of memory and failed, that shouldn't harm the rest of the system. If the system runs out of memory while trying to hand off the request to the user code, however - that kind of thing could be nastier.