We actually ran into this a long time ago with Solaris and Java. Java has JSP, Java Server Pages. JSP processing translates a JSP file into Java source code, c

We actually ran into this a long time ago with Solaris and Java. Java has JSP, Java Server Pages. JSP processing translates a JSP file into Java source code, compiles it, then caches, loads, and executes the resulting class file. Back then, the server would invoke the javac compiler through a standard fork and exec. That’s all well and good, save when you have a large app server image sucking up the majority of the machine. As far as we could tell, it was a copy on write kind of process, it didn’t actually try to do the actual work when forking the app server. Rather it tried to do the allocation, found it didn’t have the space or swap, and just failed with a system OOM error (which differs from a Java out of memory/heap error). As I recall adding swap was the short term fix (once we convinced the ops guy that, yes it was possible to “run out of memory”). Long term we made sure all of our JSPs were pre-compiled. Later, this became a non issue for a variety of reasons, including being able to run the compiler natively within a running JVM.