[tkahnoski]

Depends on the underlying framework on how it isolates processes... I could see this happening in a monolithic JVM application where it pretends there are separate containers, but a fatal error in the JVM will crash the world on that server.

A related example I lived through with a Perl application, someone decided to use this library 'Storable' that would serialize the memory in a binary format. We upgraded the library and started seeing "slow" performance across the server farm.

We recognized the processes were intermittently crashing and after decoding core dumps... figured out it was this upgrade to the Storable library. Apache httpd server chugged along just fine restarting processes. So different run-time, different type of crash resiliency.

Long-term lesson... be extra cautious with memory-serialized objects. Newer libraries have better protection on this to parse a header to detect compatible issues before loading the raw object into memory, but the potential is there especially with distributed systems today.