[armedbear-devel] Low memory condition signalling

[Erik Huelsmann]

Hi,

Yesterday I completed an abcl-dev blogpost about 0.18 which handles
out of memory (OOM) conditions much better than earlier versions.
However, as the post concludes, it would be even lispier to have a
low-memory signal instead of OOM, because in that case the condition
system can be used to handle the situation right in the call stack
where the condition occurred, in order to be able to continue
execution after handling the condition.

Douglas Miles suggested we use JMX memory management notifications to
create this behaviour. Before we can implement such behaviour, a
number of questions need to be answered:

 * How does an application tell the difference between our current OOM
condition and the new behaviour?
  -> this is important, because the current behaviour unwinds the
stack; the future one won't
 * Do we remove the current behaviour?
 * Do we let the user select the parameters for signalling the
requested condition?
 * Should we let the user install handlers to be called when a
condition like this occurs?
 * <others>?


Regards,

Erik.