Yes, I was just thinking that. But if there was a bug fix along the way that 
added a single line of code that could now be causing the code not to be 
inlined.

Ralph

> On Apr 2, 2021, at 12:38 AM, Remko Popma <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 4:26 PM Ralph Goers <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> 
>> I will take a look at the link. What you are saying makes sense to a
>> degree. However, the new is actually performed in Instant.create() which is
>> 2 levels down in the call stack. Without having read the link I would
>> wonder if that qualifies.
>> 
> 
> That is at the code level, yes. But these get inlined when called
> sufficiently often.
> So it is difficult to reason about what is eligible for escape analysis
> just from the code...
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> Ralph
>> 
>>> On Apr 2, 2021, at 12:00 AM, Remko Popma <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> My understanding is that PreciseClock is garbage-free because the JVM
>> does
>>> escape analysis.
>>> Here is the relevant code:
>>> 
>>> public void init(MutableInstant mutableInstant) {
>>>   Instant instant = java.time.Clock.systemUTC().instant();
>>>   mutableInstant.initFromEpochSecond(instant.getEpochSecond(),
>>> instant.getNano());
>>> }
>>> 
>>> The code calls the instant() method, which returns an Instant object.
>>> We would think that this is not garbage-free, but it magically is thanks
>> to
>>> escape analysis!
>>> 
>>> This Instant object is only used within the init(MutableInstant) method.
>>> It is not allowed to "escape": the method accesses fields in Instant, and
>>> passes these primitive values to the initFromEpochSecond method (and does
>>> not pass the Instant object itself).
>>> 
>>> In theory, JVM escape analysis is able to detect that the object is not
>>> referenced outside that method, and stops allocating the object
>> altogether,
>>> and instead does something called "scalar replacement", where it just
>> uses
>>> the values that are actually being used, without putting them in an
>> object
>>> first and then getting them out of the object again to use these values.
>>> More details here: https://www.beyondjava.net/escape-analysis-java and
>>> https://shipilev.net/jvm/anatomy-quarks/18-scalar-replacement/
>>> 
>>> I think I tested this on Java 9, and the
>>> Google java-allocation-instrumenter library could not detect allocations.
>>> 
>>> Has that changed: do the garbage-free tests fail
>>> for org.apache.logging.log4j.core.util.SystemClock?
>>> 
>>> Note that when looking at this in a sampling profiler it may show
>>> allocations. (We actually ran into this in a work project.)
>>> Profiles tend to disable the optimizations that allow escape analysis, so
>>> our method may show up as allocating when looked at in a profiler, while
>> in
>>> real life it will not (after sufficient warmup).
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 2:46 PM Ralph Goers <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Apr 1, 2021, at 10:38 PM, Ralph Goers <[email protected]>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> In thinking about this problem I suspect we never noticed that the
>>>> PreciseClock version of our SystemClock class is not garbage free is
>>>> because we previously ran all of our unit tests with Java 8.  Now that
>> they
>>>> are using Java 11 that code is being exercised.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I’ve looked at java.time.Clock and java.time.Instant. As far as I know
>>>> those are the only two classes in Java that provide sub-millisecond
>>>> granularity. Unfortunately there is no way to call them to extract the
>>>> field data we need to initialize MutableInstant. I considered modifying
>> our
>>>> version of SystemClock to perform the same actions as java.time’s
>>>> SystemClock but the relevant method there calls
>>>> jdk.internal.misc.VM.getNanoTimeAdjustment() to correct the
>> sub-millisecond
>>>> portion. That is implemented as a native method and seems to only be
>>>> available to be called by an application when something like --add-opens
>>>> java.base/jdk.internal.misc=xxx is on the command line.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I’ve also considered disabling the PreciseClock when garbage free mode
>>>> is enabled but as far as I can tell we don’t have a single switch for
>> that.
>>>> So I would have to add yet another system property to control it.
>>>> 
>>>> One other option is to modify the documentation to indicate timestamps
>> are
>>>> not garbage free. But this seems awful since virtually every log event
>> has
>>>> one. It would make more sense to use the property to determine which to
>> use
>>>> so user’s who wish to be garbage free can continue with millisecond
>>>> granularity.
>>>> 
>>>> Ralph
>>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 


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