Catching java.lang.OutOfMemoryError?

Question

Documentation for java.lang.Error says:

An Error is a subclass of Throwable that indicates serious problems that a reasonable application

Answer 1

Yes, there are real-world scenarios. Here's mine: I need to process data sets of very many items on a cluster with limited memory per node. A given JVM instances goes through many items one after the other, but some of the items are too big to process on the cluster: I can catch the OutOfMemoryError and take note of which items are too big. Later, I can re-run just the large items on a computer with more RAM.

(Because it's a single multi-gigabyte allocation of an array that fails, the JVM is still fine after catching the error and there's enough memory to process the other items.)