Q: 8071326: ThreadPoolExecutor in endless thread creation loop if workQueue.take() throws RuntimeException

[Lev Priima]

Thanks Doug, David, Martin, especially Martin.
Is it worth to update javadoc of  ThreadPoolExecutor#Queuing section 
with this caveat ?

The original confusion in custom queue implementation raise up from 
javadoc, because BlockingQueue.take() interface specification does not 
prohibit explicitly to throw uncaught runtime exception/errors (as any 
other casual java code). But using this method in an exhaustive resource 
allocation loop obliges to deal with exceptional situations in 
work-producing methods more carefully.

Best Regards,
Lev

On 28.01.2015 7:17, David Holmes wrote:
> On 28/01/2015 7:03 AM, Lev Priima wrote:
>> Yes. And if we have BlockingQueue w/ some amount of tasks which fail
>> with exceptions, same amount of threads(not limited by neither
>> maximumPoolSize/corePoolSize) will hang under TPE which takes tasks from
>> this queue.
>>
>> It may cause problems if queue has a big percentage of exception-fail
>> tasks and we eventually get OOME while unable to create new native 
>> thread.
>
> If you use your pathological example then of course you can get into a 
> situation where the thread creation outpaces the thread termination - 
> it takes time and CPU cycles for a thread to actually complete.
>
> A BlockingQueue implementation should not have an expected failure 
> mode that results in regularly throwing Errors or RuntimeExceptions. 
> Such a BQ implementation would need to be fixed in my opinion.
>
> The TPE is working as designed - if errors/runtime-exceptions are 
> encountered the worker thread will terminate and be replaced by a 
> fresh worker. If you keep feeding the worker threads such exceptions 
> then you incur a high rate of thread churn. So don't do that. :)
>
> Cheers,
> David
>
>> Lev
>>
>> On 01/27/2015 11:31 PM, Martin Buchholz wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Lev Priima <lev.priima at oracle.com
>>> <mailto:lev.priima at oracle.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     And these thread will be cleaned only when whole TPE finished.
>>>
>>>
>>> Is this really true?  Each thread should be replaced while running and
>>> so the total number of threads retained by the TPE at any one time
>>> should be no more than core pool size.
>>