RFR: JDK-8134953: Make the GC ID available in a central place (original) (raw)

Bengt Rutisson bengt.rutisson at oracle.com
Tue Sep 8 11:35:12 UTC 2015

Hi everyone,

This is mostly a GC related patch, but it adds a field to the Thread class, so I'm sending this out on the broader hotspot-dev list.

Could I have a couple of reviews for this patch?

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~brutisso/8134953/webrev.01/ https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8134953

Currently the GC ID, that is used for event tracing and logging, is stored in the GCTracer object. That has caused some minor problems since there are multiple GCTracers active at the same time. The correct GC IDs need to be passed around in many places.

For some upcoming GC logging changes I would like to have a more consistent way of finding the currently active GC ID. I've played around with a couple of different solutions, but eventually I found that the simplest solution is to store the current GC ID in the thread. That way there is a single way to look it up in all places. It is also fairly straight forward to set it up.

I've reworked the GCId class a bit to support this and I've introduced a GCIdMark class that is a scoped object that helps to set up and tear down a current GC ID. By moving the GC ID out from the GCTracer class I got rid of a few minor issues as well. One is that we no longer need to keep track of the G1 "aborted concurrent GC ID". That was necessary before since we did logging after we had told the corresponding GCTracer that the concurrent cycle was aborted and it had thrown its GC ID away. Now the GC ID can stay in scope until we have completed all logging.

Also the HeapDumpBeforeFullGC and PrintClassHistogramBeforeFullGC used to have to create a new GC ID since their logging was done before we had the correct GCTracer set up. Now the GC ID can be available early enough for this logging to be using the same (and correct) GC ID as the rest of the GC. Same for HeapDumpAfterFullGC and PrintClassHistogramAfterFullGC.

I've added an uint to the Thread class to keep track of the currently active GC ID. In the current code there are actually only NamedThreads that need the GC ID. So, I'm not sure where the best place is for this field is. But it seems like the Thread class contains most of the data, even data that is only used by some subclasses, so I opted for putting the field in Thread as opposed to in NamedThread. This opens up for possible future extensions when Java threads may do part of the GC work. However, I'm open to moving the field down to NamedThread if that is seen as better.

In the GCTracer class there were many asserts that were checking that the GC ID was properly set up. Mostly these assert verify that start/end is called correctly and that the other methods are called inside of the start/end scope. Now that the GC ID is moved out of the GCTracer class these asserts had to be dealt with. I figured there were three ways to handle it; just remove them, replace them with check that the GC ID from the current thread is correct, or implement a new status field to keep track of GC start/end state. Personally I'm not sure these asserts are valuable enough to spend time on, so I went for the first approach: removing them. I don't think making them use the thread GC ID will be appropriate. But if anyone feels strongly about these asserts I can implement a separate start/end state.

There are a few "Tasks" in the GC code that are executed by worker threads. To make the worker threads use the correct GC ID I make sure that the Task constructors copy the GC ID from the initiating thread into a local variable. When the task is executed in its worker thread it sets up the GC ID based on the local variable.

The proposed change does not alter any logging (except for the small bug fix for HeapDumpBefore(After)FullGC/PrintClassHistogramBefore(After)FullGC. This means that no existing tests need to be updated. In particular the test/gc/logging/TestGCId.java test passes even after these changes.

A big thanks to Per, who pre-reviewed these changes and came with some really good feedback.

Thanks, Bengt

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