Proposal: Fully Concurrent ClassLoading

[Peter Levart]

Hi David,

What about a middle-ground mode where findLoadedClass() and delegation 
to parent would be called without locks and only findClass() would be 
guarded by a per-class-name-per-classloader lock? In this mode 
concurrent attempts to define the same class would still be possible, 
but the possibility would be much lower. Usually findClass() involves 
non-ignorable level of resource-intensive work (ZIP, IO, NET) before it 
calls defineClass()...
Also, in this mode, the Map of locks could be implemented so that lock 
objects would be Weak(ly)Reference(d), since requests for already loaded 
classes would be satisfied by findLoadedClass() already. We'd just need 
a ConcurrentWeakValuesHashMap.

There must be something I'm missing here, isn't it?

Regards, Peter

On 12/05/2012 12:59 PM, David Holmes wrote:
> Java 7 introduced support for parallel classloading by adding to each 
> class loader a ConcurrentHashMap, referenced through a new field, 
> parallelLockMap. This contains a mapping from class names to Objects 
> to use as a classloading lock for that class name. This scheme has a 
> number of inefficiencies. To address this we propose for Java 8 the 
> notion of a fully concurrent classloader ...
>
> This is a fairly simple proposal that I've written up as a blog entry:
>
> https://blogs.oracle.com/dholmes/entry/parallel_classloading_revisited_fully_concurrent 
>
>
> Please discuss this proposal here.
>
> Thanks,
> David Holmes
>