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Very heavy lock contention under load

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#1,616 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

@brettwooldridge is already working on this.

Since Sep 26, 2025.

  • #1684 by @brettwooldridge — closed without merging
  • #1688 by @brettwooldridge — open

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
28/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
backend, performance

Research direction

Start in src/com/sun/jna/internal/Cleaner.java at Cleaner.register, then trace the callers shown in the stack trace, especially Memory and ByReference construction. Reproduce under a cold start with roughly 1,000 threads on Linux amd64 and confirm that the lock contention is reduced or eliminated under comparable load.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

We're experiencing very heavy lock contention with version 5.14. It's in this section of the code https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/blob/5.14.0/src/com/sun/jna/internal/Cleaner.java#L58. In one of the thread dumps we see 647 threads waiting on the lock. We were initially running 5.10, upgrading to 5.14 didn't help.

We've tried with the latest Zulu JDK 22 and JDK 21, same result. Linux amd64. This problem now always triggers in our app immediately after a fresh start, possibly because the JVM is slower. If reduce the amount of threads initially then it doesn't trigger immediately, but it still happens after a while. Sometimes stopping and restarting the threads helps.

The server is not overloaded. We increased the number of cores two-fold and we're still experiencing the problem.

Below is the relevant part of the stacktrace.

Not sure how you can reproduce, in our case we always see this problem from cold start with about 1000 threads.

Any thoughts?

"pool-4-thread-447" #4038 [3373050] prio=5 os_prio=0 cpu=2546.58ms elapsed=612.63s tid=0x00007f5e28011e90 nid=3373050 runnabl
   java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
        at com.sun.jna.internal.Cleaner.register(Cleaner.java:58)
        - locked <0x00007f6069fdc500> (a com.sun.jna.internal.Cleaner)
        at com.sun.jna.Memory.<init>(Memory.java:122)
        at com.sun.jna.ptr.ByReference.<init>(ByReference.java:57)
        at com.sun.jna.ptr.IntByReference.<init>(IntByReference.java:35)
        at com.sun.jna.ptr.IntByReference.<init>(IntByReference.java:31)
        at java.lang.invoke.LambdaForm$DMH/0x00007f5fbbf19800.newInvokeSpecial([email protected]/LambdaForm$DMH)
        at java.lang.invoke.Invokers$Holder.invokeExact_MT([email protected]/Invokers$Holder)
        at jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.invokeImpl([email protected]/DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.j
        at jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.newInstance([email protected]/DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstanceWithCaller([email protected]/Constructor.java:502)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance([email protected]/Constructor.java:486)
        at com.sun.jna.Klass.newInstance(Klass.java:48)
        at com.sun.jna.NativeMappedConverter.defaultValue(NativeMappedConverter.java:65)
        at com.sun.jna.Structure.initializeField(Structure.java:1440)
        at com.sun.jna.Structure.initializeFields(Structure.java:1416)
        at com.sun.jna.Structure.<init>(Structure.java:218)
        at com.sun.jna.Structure.<init>(Structure.java:204)
        at com.sun.jna.Structure.<init>(Structure.java:191)
        at com.sun.jna.Structure.<init>(Structure.java:183)
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