On Nov 12, 2007, at 18:29, Chris Bowditch wrote:
Andreas L Delmelle wrote:
<snip/>
A lot of the code that accesses the ref member variable has
checks for null and since it is a WeakReference I assume the
cause of this error is the Garbage Collector removing the
reference. Adding a check for null in the rehash method seems to
avoid the error and all unit tests pass, but I would like
confirmation from a Properties expert (Andreas?) that this is a
valid fix before committing the change.
If your suggestion fixes the issue, by all means, commit. It
should not hurt to insert a check there.
I'll have a closer look at underlying causes one of the coming days.
Anyway, thanks for spotting this. The possibility of such issues
arising, was precisely the reason I did not include it in the
0.94 release.
Thanks for the prompt reply! I've now committed the check for null
in the rehash method.
Good! Just checked the code more closely, and I think your suggestion
is actually the only way to deal with it.
The reason for the NPE seems to be roughly:
- once the size of the hash-chains grows too large, a cleanup-thread
is launched (CacheCleaner), which nulls out the WeakReference if its
referent has been GC'ed, so non-synchronized get() attempts
immediately 'see' that the entry has been removed and get() needs to
try again with synchronization.
- if the size of the cleaned hash-chain is still too large, then the
map is rehashed
Now, the rehash() method obtains locks on all hash-chains
recursively. This means that it is theoretically possible that,
before rehash() obtains the lock on a given map-segment, another
cleaner-thread may have already run over it, and removed some
obsolete entries. Hence why CacheEntry.ref returns null in that case.
As to why this only happens after a few thousand documents: I'd
assume that the size of the hash-chains in that case has grown to a
point where it becomes more and more likely that there are requests
to clean up obsolete references, and those requests can interfere
with a rehash() that resulted from a previous, non-successful cleanup.
Cheers
Andreas
