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POShould I bother detecting OOM (out of memory) errors in my C code?
 

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    <p>I've devoted a large number of lines of C code to cleanup-labels/conditionals for failed memory allocation (indicated by the <code>alloc</code> family returning <code>NULL</code>). I was taught that this was a good practice so that, on memory failure, an appropriate error status could be flagged and <strong>the caller could potentially perform "graceful memory cleanup" and retry.</strong> I now have some doubts about this philosophy that I'm hoping to clear up.</p> <p>I guess it's <em>possible</em> that a caller could deallocate excessive buffer space or strip relational objects of their data, but <strong>I find the the caller rarely has the capability</strong> (or is at the appropriate level of abstraction) to do so. Also, <strong>early-returning from the called function without side effects is often non-trivial.</strong></p> <p>I also just discovered the Linux OOM killer, which seems to make these efforts totally pointless on my primary development platform.</p> <blockquote> <p>By default, Linux follows an optimistic memory allocation strategy. This means that when malloc() returns non-NULL there is no guarantee that the memory really is available. This is a really bad bug. In case it turns out that the system is out of memory, one or more processes will be killed by the infamous OOM killer.</p> </blockquote> <p>I figure there are probably other platforms out there that follow the same principle. <strong>Is there something pragmatic that makes checking for OOM conditions worthwhile?</strong></p>
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