Reducing Garbage Generated by URLClassLoader

[Claes Redestad]

Hi Scott,

On 12/04/2016 01:21 PM, Scott Palmer wrote:
> Excuse me if this is the wrong list for this discussion.  Please direct me to the right place if this isn’t it.

I think this is a good place based on the aspects you're addressing.

>
> When doing an analysis of garbage generation in our application we discovered a significant number of redundant strings generated by the class loader.  In my case there are hundreds of jars on the classpath - everything in the application is a plugin.  I figured on average 10kB of useless garbage char[]s were generated per findResource call for plugin resources.
>
> This is caused mostly by the ZipFile implementation.  What is the purpose of java.util.zip.ZipCoder’s byte[] getBytes(String s) method?  It seems to simply be a custom implementation of string.getBytes(CharSet cs) and as such needs to first make a copy of the char[] to work on.  This combined with the need to operate on byte[] path names internally in the ZipFile implementation means that URLClassLoader generates a lot of unnecessary garbage in a findResource call - proportional to the number of jars on the classpath.
>
> Since JarFile forces the ZipFile to be open with UTF-8 always, if there was some API exposed that took a byte[] for the resource name, all of that extra string copying and encoding could be hoisted out of the loop in sun.misc.URLClassPath. Would this be worth it creating an internal class for something like a ‘ClasspathJarFile’ to and tweaking ZipFile so the byte[] based method is protected instead of private?

I can't answer for ZipCoder, but there's been some recent attempts to 
address some of this, the latest of which was ultimately abandoned since 
the added complexity was deemed too high:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2015-June/034397.html

Is there some way for you to test that patch on your application on an 
OpenJDK build? If it gives you more than 1-2% it might be reason to re-open.

Exposing methods that take byte[]s as input is probably not a good idea, 
however, since it can lead to various unwanted side-effects[1]

> I also noticed that sun.net.www.ParseUtil.encodePath(String, boolean) usually had nothing useful to do but still made three copies of the string passed in anyway (two char arrays to work on, and the String returned).

I've seen this in some startup profiles before, and it did look like a 
low-hanging fruit at that time too, but I recall having issues with 
regressing on strings that actually needs to be encoded. Could be rather 
straightforward to resolve if someone has time to attempt a solution 
that avoids allocation when there's nothing to encode and can avoid a 
throughput regression when encoding *does* happen I'd be happy to review it.

Thanks!

/Claes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_check_to_time_of_use

>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Scott
>