On Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:45:33 GMT, Thomas Stuefe <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I analyzed the performance of Thread.setName() in response to a customer
>> workload running Cassandra, where Thread.setName() showed up (mostly because
>> of rather pathetic use of setName() from Cassanda *sigh*).
>>
>> Profiling showed that most time (around 75%) is spent in the actual syscall,
>> so there are limits on what we can do. There is some fixed overheads like
>> the cost for synchronized, and also some costs that scale with the length of
>> the name, most importantly the UTF8 conversion.
>>
>> I implemented the following improvements:
>> - Removed synchronized from setName(), as suggested by some folks in the
>> JBS issue. This saves ~15 nanoseconds. Not sure if the method could be
>> called contended by Cassandra, if so, the savings might be much larger.
>> - Almost all thread names are Latin1/ASCII, and there is no need to convert
>> to UTF8 in that case. Also, the various OS APIs to set the thread name don't
>> even seem to specify the character encoding. Avoiding the UTF8 conversion
>> brings down the length-dependent costs. In many cases we can also pass down
>> the backing array of the string and avoid copying.
>> - When the name doesn't change, we can skip updating the native name, which
>> makes setName() almost a no-op.
>> - For truncating the name on Linux to 16 chars, instead of using snprintf
>> with a pattern, we can simply stitch together the name directly (first 7
>> chars, last 6 chars, 2 dots in between), this saves ~100ns.
>>
>> In the end, we bring down performance for the small cases by ~7%, longer
>> names by ~20% and completely removed the conversion overhead that primarily
>> affected longer names.
>>
>> | Benchmark | (length) | Baseline (ns/op) | Optimized (ns/op) | Change
>> |
>>
>> |---------------|----------|------------------:|-------------------:|--------:|
>> | setName | 1 | 602.3 ± 2.0 | 561.9 ± 1.5 |
>> -6.7% |
>> | setName | 4 | 605.9 ± 2.1 | 570.2 ± 1.2 |
>> -5.9% |
>> | setName | 15 | 617.1 ± 2.7 | 570.4 ± 2.8 |
>> -7.6% |
>> | setName | 16 | 712.1 ± 6.0 | 569.4 ± 2.7 |
>> -20.0% |
>> | setName | 50 | 757.9 ± 5.2 | 566.3 ± 4.6 |
>> -25.3% |
>> | setName | 200 | 986.2 ± 2.7 | 569.9 ± 4.9 |
>> -42.2% |
>> | setNameSame | 1 | — | 7.4 ± 0.0 | —
>> |
>> | setNameSame | 4 | — | 7.4 ± 0.0 | —
>> |
>> | setNameSame | 15 | —...
>
> src/java.base/share/classes/java/lang/Thread.java line 1800:
>
>> 1798: this.name = name;
>> 1799: if (!isVirtual() && Thread.currentThread() == this &&
>> !name.equals(oldName)) {
>> 1800: setNativeName(name);
>
> For Linux, you only need to compare the first 16 chars.
> For MacOS, just the first 64 (MAXTHREADNAMESIZE).
The Java code doesn't know about those platform limits - nor should it IMO.
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PR Review Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/30374#discussion_r2981479314
