I've been running the new build and havent seen any more loops; I think
race conditions are gone.
Incidentally, given we didnt see any way that the thing could loop,
given we were using threadlocal to store a per-thread datastructure, and
given that threadlocals are implicitly thread safe, I'm still not sure
where the problem arose. but I have been pointed at some bugs in ThreadLocal
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6550283
"ThreadLocal.initialValue() may be called multiple times in some cases"
There is a bit of a race condition on initialisation, *across all
threadlocal classes in use in that thread*. if you are only using your
own classes, you need to sync off something common (like the current
thread). But you are still vulnerable to any other class using Thread
local storage making an operation that increases the size of the hash
table of threadlocal values, in which case you are stuffed.
This is a WONTFIX for Java<1.6.
Accordingly, you can't reliably use ThreadLocal on a multicpu system for
Java <=1.5 as you cannot be sure that other classes wont stamp on you.
This is pretty serious, as the reason you would use TLS is to avoid
concurrency problems.
-Steve
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