Suppose one or more MBeans in an MBean Server send many large notifications, and that there is at least one JMX Connector Server attached to the MBean Server with at least one client that has registered for notifications. Then the Connector Server will buffer up those notifications indefinitely, in a buffer with size 1000. This uses up a lot of memory, and the memory is not available for other purposes.
If all, or perhaps just the oldest, notifications in the notification buffer were wrapped in SoftReferences then they would be dropped when memory was short. The logic for notification sending could notice the now-empty SoftReference and arrange for the client to see non-contiguous sequence numbers. The client will react by signalling that notifications have been lost, as they have.
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