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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ABDERA-153?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12676929#action_12676929
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Jorge Tercero commented on ABDERA-153:
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Is this fix part of any release, did it make it to 0.4.0?
I'm asking because I see "Fix Version/s: None" in the issue heading.
> Serious memory leak in ExtensionFactoryMap
> ------------------------------------------
>
> Key: ABDERA-153
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ABDERA-153
> Project: Abdera
> Issue Type: Bug
> Affects Versions: 0.3.0
> Environment: N/A
> Reporter: Chris Berry
> Priority: Critical
> Attachments: ExtensionFactoryMap.patch
>
>
> Greetings,
> Some time ago we reported a very serious memory leak in Abdera 0.3.0.
> It was reported to the abdera users list on Nov 7, 2007 as "memory leak".
> That message is replayed below...
> At the time we could workaround the bug in our client, but over time this
> became impossible, and we had to hack ExtensionFactoryMap.
> Attached is a patch to org.apache.abdera.factory.ExtensionFactoryMap
> This patch simply removes the problem -- the WeakHashMap.
> This change has a negligible effect on performance (as measured in load
> testing)
> But without it, abdera 0.3.0 will get OutOfMemoryExceptions quite quickly
> under load, rendering it unusable.
> BTW: this code has been in Production for many weeks...
> We were hoping that you could apply this patch to 0.3.0??
> Or better; produce 0.3.1
> We are not able to upgrade to 0.4.0 yet, and would rather not have a hacked
> copy of 0.3.0.
> Also, others not able to upgrade yet (since the upgrade is not entirely
> transparent) may benefit from the patch
> I will also open a JIRA on this.
> Thanks,
> -- Chris
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: memory leak
> Date: November 5, 2007 3:49:24 PM CST
> To: [email protected]
> Reply-To: [email protected]
> Hey All -
> I'm working on a data service based on Abdera (working with Chris Berry,
> who's a regular on these lists...) When we were running our first battery of
> serious load testing on our system, we encountered memory-leaky behavior, and
> a profiler showed us that we were indeed leaking hundreds of megabytes a
> minute, all traceable back to the wrappers field on
> org.apache.abdera.factory.ExtensionFactoryMap. This field is a map from
> elements to their wrappers, if any. At first, I was puzzled by the memory
> leak, as the field is initialized thusly:
> this.wrappers = Collections.synchronizedMap( new
> WeakHashMap<Element,Element>());
> clearly, the implementor took care to make sure that this cache would not
> leak by making it a WeakHashMap, which generally guarantees that the map
> itself will not keep a key and its corresponding entry from being garbage
> collected. I dug throughout our application code to find if we were actually
> holding other references to these objects, and I googled for anyone having
> problems with esoteric interactions between Collections.synchronizedMap and
> WeakHashMaps - found nothing there. Then I went back to square one and
> re-read the WeakHashMap javadoc very carefully. Here's the relevant section:
> Implementation note: The value objects in a WeakHashMap are held by
> ordinary strong references. Thus care should be taken to ensure that value
> objects do not strongly refer to their own keys, either directly or
> indirectly, since that will prevent the keys from being discarded. Note that
> a value object may refer indirectly to its key via the WeakHashMap itself;
> that is, a value object may strongly refer to some other key object whose
> associated value object, in turn, strongly refers to the key of the first
> value object. One way to deal with this is to wrap values themselves within
> WeakReferences before inserting, as in: m.put(key, new WeakReference(value)),
> and then unwrapping upon each get.
> This is why there is a memory leak - the map is a mapping from elements to
> their wrappers - by the very nature of the object being a wrapper of the
> element, it will usually have a strong reference to the element itself, which
> is the key! You can verify that Abdera wrappers, in general, will do this by
> looking at org.apache.abdera.model.ElementWrapper, which takes the element
> being wrapped as its constructor argument, and holds a strong reference to it
> as an instance variable.
> This map is an optimization to memoize the calls to getElementWrapper() and
> not reconstruct them more than is necessary - it is not needed for abdera to
> function properly, so we have temporarily worked around the problem in our
> own application like so - we used to acquire our FOMFactory by calling
> abdera.getFactory() on our org.apache.abdera.Abdera instance, and re-using
> that singleton throughout our application. Now we construct a new FOMFactory
> with new FOMFactory(abdera) once per request to the server, and since the
> only appreciable state on the factory is this map itself, this is a valid
> work-around.
> I'd initially planned to really fix this issue and submit a patch along with
> this message, but digging a little deeper, I'm not sure that the correct fix
> is crystal clear... We could do as the javadoc above suggests, and wrap the
> values with WeakReferences to plug the leak, or we could use a LinkedHashMap
> configured as an LRU cache to just bound the cache, so it can't grow out of
> control - but right now, I don't think that either of those solutions would
> be correct, because it seems to me that none of the objects in the hierarchy
> rooted at FOMElement define equals() and/or hashCode() methods, so all of the
> objects are cached based on their actual object identity. It seems that in
> the all likely use cases, instances of FOMElement and its descendants are
> re-parsed on every request to a server running abdera, and so what we will
> see is cache misses virtually 100% of the time, so even though we'd have
> plugged the leak, strictly speaking, we would have ignored the underlying
> issue that we're caching data on every request that will be fundamentally
> unable to be retrieved on subsequent requests. This is based only on my
> reading over the code for a few hours, so I could be missing something, and I
> also might be forgetting about a use case that demands and makes proper use
> of this memoization, but as it stands right now, my recommended fix would
> probably be to just cut out the cache altogether, and allow for wrappers to
> get constructed fresh every time they are requested. One more possibility is
> that the cache is actually a useful optimization, but only during the scope
> of one request - in which case the "work-around" we are using now is actually
> the best practice, and the fix would be to remove the factory instance on the
> Abdera class...
> I'd like to hear from the Abdera developers what their thoughts are on this
> issue, and what the best resolution is likely to be. This is no longer a
> pressing issue for our team, but it is potentially a time bomb waiting to
> blow up for any project dependent on Abdera.
> thanks! (and thanks for Abdera, generally - we're easily a year ahead of
> where we'd be on this project without it!)
> -Bryon (long-time listener, first-time caller)
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