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Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 11:14:29 -0700
From: "Rana Dasgupta" <rdasgupt@gmail.com>
To: dev@harmony.apache.org
Subject: Re: [drlvm] stress.Mix / MegaSpawn threading bug
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On 1/9/07, Weldon Washburn <weldonwjw@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/9/07, Gregory Shimansky <gshimansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I've tried to analyze MegaSpawn test on windows and here's what I found
> >> out.
> >>
> >> OOME is thrown because process virtual size easily gets up to 2Gb. This
> >> happens at about ~1.5k simultaneously running threads. I think it
> >> happens because all of virtual process memory is mapped for thread
> stacks.
> >>
>
> >Good job!  I got the same sort of hunch when I looked at the source code
> did
> >not have enough time to pin down specifics.  The only guidance I
> >found regarding what happens when too many threads are spawned is the
> >following in the java.lang.Thread reference manual, "...specifying a
> lower
> >[stacksize] value may allow a greater number of threads to exist
> >concurrently without throwing an OutOfMemoryError (or other internal
> >error)."
>
> >I think what the above implies is that it is OK for the JVM to error and
> >exit if the app tries to create too many threads.  If this is the case,
> it
> >sort of looks like we need to clean up the handling of malloc() errors so
> >that the JVM can exit gracefully.


I am not sure that we need to do something about this. The default initial
stack size on Windows is 1M, and that is the recommended init size for real
applications. The fact that our threads start with a larger intial stack
mapped( default ) than RI is a design issue, it is not a bug. We could start
with 2K and create many more threads! Exactly as Gregory points out,
ultimately we will hit virtual memory limits and fail. The reason the RI
seems to fail less is that the test ends before running out of virtual
memory.On my 32 bit RHEL Linux box, RI fails almost every time with
MegaSpawn, with an identical OOME error message and stack dump.

We can catch the exception in the test and print a message. But I am not
very sure what purpose that would serve. A resource exhaustion exception is
a fatal exception and the process is hosed, no real app would be able to do
anything more at this point. We should not use this test ( which is not a
real app ) as guidance to tune the initial stack size. My suggestion is to
lower the test duration so that we can create about a 1000( or whatever
magic number ) threads at least. That is the stress condition we should test
for.

Thanks,
Rana

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