“The “back” stack is unlimited, meaning we’re saving more and more state until we explode”
A Java remote UI service ran out of memory, and capacity planning said buy more servers. A memory dump found one session holding a 1.5GB string, mostly backslashes. Every screen serialized the previous screen to JSON and stored it as a string, so each step back re-escaped every quote again. Nobody needed more hardware. They needed to look at one heap dump.