Hi Peter,
Sorry for the delay on this.
Generally your VolatileData and my ReflectionHelper are doing a similar
job. But I agree with your reasoning that all of the cached
SoftReferences are likely to be cleared at once, and so a SoftReference
to a helper object with direct references, is more effective than a
direct reference to a helper object with SoftReferences. My initial
stance with this was very conservative as the more change that is
introduced the more uncertainty there is about the impact.
I say the above primarily because I think, if I am to proceed with this,
I will need to separate out the general reflection caching changes from
the annotation changes. There are a number of reasons for this:
First, I'm not at all familiar with the implementation of annotations at
the VM or Java level, and the recent changes in this area just
exacerbate my ignorance of the mechanics. So I don't feel qualified to
evaluate that aspect.
Second, the bulk of the reflection caching code is simplified by the
fact that due to current constraints on class redefinition the caching
is effectively idempotent for fields/methods/constructors. But that is
not the case for annotations.
Finally, the use of synchronization with the annotations method is
perplexing me. I sent Joe a private email on this but I may as well
raise it here - and I think you have alluded to this in your earlier
emails as well: initAnnotationsIfNecessary() is a synchronized instance
method but I can not find any other code in the VM that synchronizes on
the Class object's monitor. So if this synchronization is trying to
establish consistency in the face of class redefinition, I do not see
where class redefinition is participating in the synchronization!
So what I would like to do is take your basic VolatileData part of the
patch and run with it for JEP-149 purposes, while separating the
annotations issue so they can be dealt with by the experts in that
particular area.
I'm sorry it has taken so long to arrive at a fairly negative position,
but I need someone else to take up the annotations gauntlet and run with it.
Thanks,
David
On 3/12/2012 5:41 PM, Peter Levart wrote:
Hi David, Alan, Alexander and others,
In the meanwhile I have added another annotations space optimization to
the patch. If a Class doesn't inherit any annotations from a superclass,
which I think is a common case, it assigns the same Map instance to
"annotations" as well as "declaredAnnotations" fields. Previously - and
in the original code - this only happened for java.lang.Object and
interfaces.
Here's the updated webrev:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/101777488/jdk8-tl/JEP-149/webrev.02/index.html
I have also rewritten the performance micro-benchmarks. With the
addition of repeating annotations, one performance aspect surfaces: when
asking for a particular annotation type on a Class and that annotation
is not present, the new repeating annotations support method
AnnotationSupport.getOneAnnotation asks for @ContainedBy meta-annotation
on the annotation type. This can result in an even more apparent
synchronization hot-spot with original code that uses synchronized
initAnnotationsIfNecessary(). This aspect is tested with the 3rd test.
Other 2 tests test the same thing as before but are more stable now,
since now they measure retrieval of 5 different annotation types from
each AnnotatedElement, previously they only measured retrieval of 1
which was very sensitive to HashMap irregularities (it could happen that
a particular key mapped to a bucket that was overloaded in one test-run
and not in another)...
Here're the new tests:
https://raw.github.com/plevart/jdk8-tl/JEP-149/test/src/test/ReflectionTest.java
And the corresponding results when run on an i7 CPU on Linux:
https://raw.github.com/plevart/jdk8-tl/JEP-149/test/benchmark_results_i7-2600K.txt
Regards, Peter
On 12/03/2012 02:15 AM, David Holmes wrote:
On 1/12/2012 4:54 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
On 30/11/2012 18:36, Peter Levart wrote:
:
So, what do you think? What kind of tests should I prepare in addidion
to those 3 so that the patch might get a consideration?
I think this is good work and thanks for re-basing your patch. I know
David plans to do a detail review. I think it will require extensive
performance testing too, perhaps with some large applications.
Indeed I do plan a detailed review and have initiated some initial
performance tests.
I am also swamped but will try to get to the review this week - and
will also need to check the referenced annotations updates.
David
-Alan
