Thanks Gregg, You've hit the nail on the head, this is exactly the issue I'm having.
So I've been fixing safe publication in constructors by making fields final or volatile and ensuring "this" doesn't escape, fixing synchronisation on collections etc during method calls. To fix deadlock, I investigate immutable non blocking data structures with volatile publication, if future state doesn't depend on previous state, if it does a CAS atomic reference can be used instead of volatile. Often i find synchronization is quite acceptable if it is limited in scope, if synchronized or holding a lock while a thread is executing outside your objects scope of control, that's when deadlock is more likely to occur. The polciy providers were deadlock prone, which is why they're mostly immutable non blocking now, any synchronization or locking is limited. I basically follow Doug Lea's concurrency in practise guidelines. For debugging I follow Cliff Click's reccommendations. Unfortunately fixing concurrency bugs means finding a trace of execution, identifying all classes and inspecting the code visually. Findbugs identifies cases of inadequate sychronization using static analysis. Regards, Peter. ----- Original message ----- > On 4/7/2013 7:03 PM, Greg Trasuk wrote: > > I'm honestly and truly not passing judgement on the quality of the code. I > > honestly don't know if it's good or bad. I have to confess that, given that > > Jini was written as a top-level project at Sun, sponsored by Bill Joy, when > > Sun was at the top of its game, and the Jini project team was a "who's-who" > > of > > distributed computing pioneers, the idea that it's riddled with concurrency > > bugs surprises me. But mainly, I'm still trying to answer that question - > > "How > > do I know if it's good?" Here's what I'm doing: - I'm attempting to run the > > tests from "tags/2.2.0" against the "2.2" branch. When I have confidence in > > the "2.2" branch, I'll publish the results, ask anyone else who's interested > > to test it, and then call for a release on "2.2.1" - After that, the > > developers need to reach consensus about how to move forward. Cheers, Greg. > > This is an important issue to address. I know a lot of people here probably > don't participate on the Concurrency-interest mailing list that has a wide > range > of discussion about the JLS vs the JMM and what the JIT compilers actually do > to > code these days. > > The number one issue that you need to understand, is that the optimizer is > working against you more and more these days if you don't have JMM details > exactly write. Statements are being reordered more and more, including actual > "assignments" which can expose uninitialized data items in "racy" concurrent > code. The latest example is the Thread.setName()/Thread.getName() pair. > They > are most likely always to be accessed by "other threads", yet there is no > synchronization on them, including no "visibility" control with volatile > even. > What this means, is that if setName() and getName() are being called in a racy > environment, the setName, will assign the array that is created to copy the > characters into, before the arraycopy of the data occurs, potentially exposing > an uninitialized name to getName(). > > There are literally hundreds of places in the JDK that still have these kinds > of > races going on, and no one at Oracle, based on how people are acting, appears > to > be responsible for dealing with it. The Jini code, has many many of the same > issues that just randomly appear in stress cases on "slower" or "faster" > hardware, depending on the issue. > > When you haven't got sharing and visibility covered correctly, the JIT code > rewrites can make execution order play a big part in conflating what you "see" > happening verses what the "code" says, to you, should happen. > > There are some very simple things to get the JIT out of the picture. One of > these, is to actually open the source up in an IDE and declare every field > final. If that doesn't work due to 'mutation' of values, change those fields > to > 'volatile' so that it will compile again. Then run your tests and you will > now > greatly diminish reordering and visibility issues so that you can just get to > the simple "was it set correctly, before it was read" and "did we provide the > correct atomicity for that update" kinds of questions that will help you > understand things better when code is misbehaving. > > This is the kind of thing that Peter has been working through because the > usage > of the code in real life has not continued in the same way that it did when > the > code was written, and the JMM in JDK5 has literally broken so much software, > all > over the planet, that used to work quite well, because there wasn't a formal > definition of "happens before". Now that there is, the compiler > optimizations > are against you if you don't get it right. The behaviors you will experience, > because of reorderings that are targeted at all out performance (minimize > traffic in and out of the CPU through memory subsystems), can create > completely > unexpected results. Intra-thread semantics are kept correct, but inter-thread > execution will just seem intangible because stuff will not be happening in the > order the "code" says it should. > > Gregg Wonderly >
