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Having worked on ATC, this really does sound like a software bug. Fixing such a bug on a delivered system would require an immense amount of costly testing. Adding memory is the cheap option.

The other thing to consider is that some of these systems are rather old and could easily have less than a gig of ram.

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That sounds very worrying. The fact that this issue occurs shows that they didn't prepare for OOM conditions, and another issue could easily cause a different OOM condition they didn't prepare for. It's not inconceivable that there could be an issue which gobbles up an amount of memory you throw at it. It is a tragic irony that the fact that testing is costly may be the very reason this condition was not tested for.

I can no longer edit. "an amount" should be "any amount".

> Adding memory is the cheap option

Only in the sense of having a broken system, putting in place some procedural constraints and then praying that everyone follows the rules.

As you say, it's a software bug. Until it's been 100% characterised and tested this leaves a huge question mark hanging over the system. Adding memory is a band aid solution.

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