Details
Major Description
We recently saw an issue where a large deletion was issued which caused 25M blocks to be collected during deleteInternal. Currently, the list of collected blocks is an ArrayList, meaning that we had to allocate a contiguous 25M-entry array (~400MB). After a NN has been running for a long amount of time, the old generation may become fragmented such that it's hard to find a 400MB contiguous chunk of heap.
In general, we should try to design the NN such that the only large objects are long-lived and created at startup time. We can improve this particular case (and perhaps some others) by introducing a new List implementation which is made of a linked list of arrays, each of which is size-limited (eg to 1MB).