[bob1029]

It is interesting what you can come up with if you rely on constraints in the physical realm to inform your virtual realm choices. I've been looking at various highly-available application architectures and came across a similar idea to the missile equation in the article. If you are on a single box your hands are tied. But, if you have an N+1 (or more) architecture, things can get fun.

In theory, you could have a cluster of identical nodes each handling client requests (i.e. behind a load balancer). Each node would monitor its own application memory utilization and automatically cycle itself after some threshold is hit (after draining its buffers). From the perspective of the programmer, you now get to operate in a magical domain where you can allocate whatever you want and never think about how it has to be cleaned up. Obviously, you wouldn't want to maliciously use malloc, but as long as the cycle time of each run is longer than a few minutes I feel the overhead is accounted for.

Also, the above concept could apply to a single node with multiple independent processes performing the same feat, but there may be some increased concerns with memory fragmentation at the OS-level. Worst case with the distributed cluster of nodes, you can simply power cycle the entire node to wipe memory at the physical level and then bring it back up as a clean slate.