How do you crash a JVM?

Question

I was reading a book on programming skills wherein the author asks the interviewee, \"How do you crash a JVM?\" I thought that you could do so by writing an infinite for-loo

Answer 1

If you create a thread process that infinitely spawns more threads (which spawn more threads, which...) you'll eventually cause a stack overflow error in the JVM itself.

public class Crash {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Runnable[] arr = new Runnable[1];
        arr[0] = () -> {

            while (true) {
                new Thread(arr[0]).start();
            }
        };

        arr[0].run();
    }
}

This gave me the output (after 5 minutes, watch your ram)

An unrecoverable stack overflow has occurred.
#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  EXCEPTION_STACK_OVERFLOW (0xc00000fd) at pc=0x0000000070e53ed7, pid=12840, tid=0x0000000000101078
#
# JRE version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (8.0_144-b01) (build 1.8.0_144-b01)
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (25.144-b01 mixed mode windows-amd64 compressed oops)
# Problematic frame:
#