In theory, yes, but when you run low on memory (heap, PermGen space, whatever), you can run into unusual situations. You may have a bunch of threads spinning wi

In theory, yes, but when you run low on memory (heap, PermGen space, whatever), you can run into unusual situations. You may have a bunch of threads spinning with exceptions, continually retrying, making no progress. You'll have no choice but to kill -9 your process and restart.