This reminded me of embedded Java project that I worked 20 years ago. The VM had only 10MB of RAM and properly dealing with out-of-memory exceptions was a must.

This reminded me of embedded Java project that I worked 20 years ago. The VM had only 10MB of RAM and properly dealing with out-of-memory exceptions was a must. The most effective strategy was to preallocate like 200K array. Then on any memory exception the code released that array and set a global flag. The flag was queried through out the code to aggressively minimize memory usage until it drops to tolerable limit. The preallocated buffer was essential. Without it typical result was recursive out-of-memory that eventually deadlocked/crashed the VM with no recovery.