RFR (S): JEP-142: Reduce Cache Contention on Specified Fields

[Jesper Wilhelmsson]

Looks good to me. Even though I would prefer not to add more stuff in 
sun.misc, but if that makes people happy I don't have a strong opinion. 
There are others that know language design better than me.

What I do have an opinion about is garbage collection, and I have a 
potential future work question.

Annotated fields and classes will be padded and require more memory. 
What would be the optimal behavior in an out of memory situation? Should 
the GC try to remove the padding to keep OOME away, or should we just 
accept that these objects are now larger and we are out of memory.

Also, the current design adds twice the size of a normal cache line, one 
potential improvement could be to make sure that allocation and GC are 
aware of these padded fields and always place them at the start of a 
cache line and only pads as much as needed to fill the rest of the cache 
line. I'm not suggesting that this should be done now, it's quite a lot 
of work to get that working actually, but for future thoughts. Maybe 
something for a PhD student to look at ;-)
/Jesper


On 27/11/12 12:35 PM, Doug Lea wrote:
> On 11/27/12 04:07, Remi Forax wrote:
>
>> A lot of people already uses classes from j.u.c, j.u.c.atomic is more 
>> exotic.
>> Given that @Contented is exotic too ...
>>
>
> And, as someone else noted, sun.misc (where Unsafe lives) is even
> more exotic, and has the audience of low-level/core developers
> that this targets. Placing it there would get us past all the
> concerns (that I honestly think are wrong) about sending the
> wrong message or precluding miraculous automation. So, how
> about we just live with it as follows:
>
> (I updated some of the javadoc wording but removed placeholder
> section on sample usages to added only (if ever) only after
> gaining more experience.)
>
>
> package sun.misc;
>
> import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
> import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
> import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
> import java.lang.annotation.Target;
>
> /**
>  * An annotation expressing that objects and/or their fields are
>  * expected to encounter memory contention, generally in the form of
>  * "false sharing". This annotation serves as a hint that such objects
>  * and fields should reside in locations isolated from those of other
>  * objects or fields. Susceptibility to memory contention is a
>  * property of the intended usages of objects and fields, not their
>  * types or qualifiers. The effects of this annotation will nearly
>  * always add significant space overhead to objects.  The use of
>  * {@code @Contended} is warranted only when the performance impact of
>  * this time/space tradeoff is intrinsically worthwhile; for example,
>  * in concurrent contexts in which each instance of the annotated
>  * object is often accessed by a different thread.
>  *
>  * <p>A {@code @Contended} field annotation may optionally include a
>  * contention group tag. All fields with the same tag are considered
>  * as a group with respect to isolation from other groups. A default
>  * annotation without a tag indicates contention with all other
>  * fields, including other {@code @Contended} ones.
>
>  * <p>When the annotation is used at the class level, all unannotated
>  * fields of the object are considered to be in the same default
>  * group, separate from any fields that carry their own (possibly
>  * tagged) {@code @Contended} annotations.
>  *
>  * @since 1.8
>  */
> @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
> @Target({ElementType.FIELD, ElementType.TYPE})
> public @interface Contended {
>     /**
>      * The (optional) contention group tag.
>      */
>     String value() default "";
> }
>
>
>
>