How do I check if ConcurrentLinkedQueue leaves gar

Question

I am using a bunch of ConcurrentLinkedQueues in my application and the GC overhead is huge. How do I check if the ConcurrentLinkedQueue is the culprit? Is there a standard way in Java to profile these data structures for memory allocation/deallocation?

Answer 1

Try using VisualVM, the official(?) java profiler. Play around with that for a little bit. You can analyze the processes AND the memory of any Java program you're running.

Answer 2

One way to do it is to write a simple test program and run it with the -verbose:gc JVM option. For example, the code:

import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentLinkedQueue;

public class TestGC {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        final ConcurrentLinkedQueue<String> queue = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<String>();

        String[] strings = new String[1024];

        for(int i = 0; i < strings.length; i++) {
            strings[i] = "string" + i;
        }

        System.gc();
        Thread.sleep(1000);

        System.out.println("Starting...");

        while(true) {
            for(int i = 0; i < strings.length; i++) queue.offer(strings[i]);
            for(int i = 0; i < strings.length; i++) queue.poll();
        }
    }
}

Produces the output:

$ java -verbose:gc TestGC
[GC 1352K->560K(62976K), 0.0015210 secs]
[Full GC 560K->440K(62976K), 0.0118410 secs]
Starting...
[GC 17336K->536K(62976K), 0.0005950 secs]
[GC 17432K->536K(62976K), 0.0006130 secs]
[GC 17432K->504K(62976K), 0.0005830 secs]
[GC 17400K->504K(62976K), 0.0010940 secs]
[GC 17400K->536K(77824K), 0.0006540 secs]
[GC 34328K->504K(79360K), 0.0008970 secs]
[GC 35320K->520K(111616K), 0.0008920 secs]
[GC 68104K->520K(111616K), 0.0009930 secs]
[GC 68104K->520K(152576K), 0.0006350 secs]
[GC 109064K->520K(147968K), 0.0007740 secs]
(keeps going forever)

Now if you want to know exactly who is the culprit you can use a profiling tool. I wrote this memory sampler that you can plug in your code to quickly find out in what source code line the instances are being created. So you do:

MemorySampler.start();
for(int i = 0; i < strings.length; i++) queue.offer(strings[i]);
for(int i = 0; i < strings.length; i++) queue.poll();
MemorySampler.end();
if (MemorySampler.wasMemoryAllocated()) MemorySampler.printSituation();

And when you run you get:

Starting...
Memory allocated on last pass: 24576
Memory allocated total: 24576

Stack Trace:
    java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentLinkedQueue.offer(ConcurrentLinkedQueue.java:327)
    TestGC.main(TestGC2.java:25)

From where you can see that line 327 of ConcurrentLinkedQueue is leaking instances for the GC, in other words, it is not pooling them:

public boolean offer(E e) {
    checkNotNull(e);
    final Node<E> newNode = new Node<E>(e);

    for (Node<E> t = tail, p = t;;) {