I can basically GUARANTEE that unless you are using large indexes and loading into a RamDirectory (and use Java prior to 1.5) , that there is NO ISSUE in using a ThreadLocal,

There is something else wrong in your application.

PLEASE get a good profiler and perform the required testing. It is amazing that so many people have spent so much time on this issue already, when in the end it has ALWAYS been demonstrated to be a user code error.

The use of ThreadLocals in Lucene is correct.

If you honestly believe there is some issue, please provide a self contained test case that demonstrates the problem.

On Dec 16, 2006, at 1:15 AM, Otis Gospodnetic wrote:

Moving to java-dev, I think this belongs here.
I've been looking at this problem some more today and reading about ThreadLocals. It's easy to misuse them and end up with memory leaks, apparently... and I think we may have this problem here.

The problem here is that ThreadLocals are tied to Threads, and I think the assumption in TermInfosReader and SegmentReader is that (search) Threads are short-lived: they come in, scan the index, do the search, return and die. In this scenario, their ThreadLocals go to heaven with them, too, and memory is freed up.

But when Threads are long-lived, as they are in thread pools (e.g. those in servlet containers), those ThreadLocals stay alive even after a single search request is done. Moreover, the Thread is reused, and the new TermInfosReader and SegmentReader put some new values in that ThreadLocal on top of the old values (I think) from the previous search request. Because the Thread still has references to ThreadLocals and the values in them, the values never get GCed.

I tried making ThreadLocals in TIR and SR static, I tried wrapping values saved in TLs in WeakReference, I've tried using WeakHashMap like in Robert Engel's FixedThreadLocal class from LUCENE-436, but nothing helped. I thought about adding a public static method to TIR and SR, so one could call it at the end of a search request (think servlet filter) and clear the TL for the current thread, but that would require making TIR and SR public and I'm not 100% sure if it would work, plus that exposes the implementation details too much.
I don't have a solution yet.
But do we *really* need ThreadLocal in TIR and SR? The only thing that TL is doing there is acting as a per-thread storage of some cloned value (in TIR we clone SegmentTermEnum and in SR we clone TermVectorsReader). Why can't we just store those cloned values in instance variables? Isn't whoever is calling TIR and SR going to be calling the same instance of TIR and SR anyway, and thus get access to those cloned values?

I'm really amazed that we haven't heard any reports about this before. I am not sure why my application started showing this leak only about 3 weeks ago. It is getting more pounded on than before, so maybe that made the leak more obvious. My guess is that more common Lucene usage is with a single index or a small number of them, and with short-lived threads, where this problem isn't easily visible. In my case I deal with a few tens of thousands of indices and several parallel search threads that live forever in the thread pool.

Any thoughts about this or possible suggestions for a fix?
Thanks,
Otis



----- Original Message ----
From: Otis Gospodnetic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: java-user@lucene.apache.org
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 12:28:29 PM
Subject: Leaking org.apache.lucene.index.* objects

Hi,

About 2-3 weeks ago I emailed about a memory leak in my application. I then found some problems in my code (I wasn't closing IndexSearchers explicitly) and took care of those. Now I see my app is still leaking memory - jconsole clearly shows the "Tenured Gen" memory pool getting filled up until I hit the OOM, but I can't seem to pin-point the source.

I found that a bunch or o.a.l.index.* objects are not getting GCed, even though they should. For example:

$ jmap -histo:live 7825 | grep apache.lucene.index | head -20 | sort -k2 -nr
num   #instances    #bytes  class name
--------------------------------------
4: 1764840 98831040 org.apache.lucene.index.CompoundFileReader$CSIndexInput
  5:   2119215    67814880  org.apache.lucene.index.TermInfo
  7:   1112459    35598688  org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentReader$Norm
  9:   2132311    34116976  org.apache.lucene.index.Term
 12:   1117897    26829528  org.apache.lucene.index.FieldInfo
 13:    225340    18027200  org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentTermEnum
 15:    589727    14153448  org.apache.lucene.index.TermBuffer
 21:     86033     8718504  [Lorg.apache.lucene.index.TermInfo;
 20:     86033     8718504  [Lorg.apache.lucene.index.Term;
 23:     86120     7578560  org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentReader
 26:     90501     5068056  org.apache.lucene.store.FSIndexInput
 27:     86120     4822720  org.apache.lucene.index.TermInfosReader
 33:     86130     3445200  org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentInfo
36: 87355 2795360 org.apache.lucene.store.FSIndexInput $Descriptor
 38:     86120     2755840  org.apache.lucene.index.FieldsReader
 39:     86050     2753600  org.apache.lucene.index.CompoundFileReader
 42:     46903     2251344  org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentInfos
43: 93778 2250672 org.apache.lucene.search.FieldCacheImpl $Entry 45: 93778 1500448 org.apache.lucene.search.FieldCacheImpl $CreationPlaceholder
 47:     86510     1384160  org.apache.lucene.index.FieldInfos

I'm running my app in search-only mode - no adds or deletes.
The counts of these objects just keeps going up, even though I am explicitly closing the IndexSearcher. I can see that file descriptors _are_ freed up after searcher.close(), because lsof no longer shows them, but the above objects just linger and accumulate, even when I force GC via jconsole or via the profiler.

I thought maybe various *Readers are not getting close()d, but I've double-checked all *Readers above, and they all seem to close their IndexInput references. The static nested class CompoundFileReader.CSIndexInput has a close() without any implementation. At first I thought that was an omission, but adding a close of the inner IndexInput there resulted in a search- time error. I've added the lovely print debugging to various close () methods and see those methods being called. I've added finalize () with some print debugging to SegmentReader, TermInfosReader, SegmentTermEnum, FieldsReader, and CompoundFileReader. All but CFReader get finalized after a while.

My application is running as a webapp and has thousands of separate indices. This means it's very multi-threaded and the servlet container has a pool of threads that handle requests, and each request may be for a different index. I cache IndexSearchers for a while, and purge/close them every N minutes if they have been idle more than M minutes. It occurred to me last night that things like TermInfosReader and SegmentReader are using ThreadLocal, and since threads are used in a thread pool, and thus shared with requests handling searches against different indices, it's not clear to me what happens with object instances that are put in those ThreadLocals in such scenario. Aren't things going to step on each others' toes? TIR has close() and SR has doClose(), so I put <TL inst>.set(null) there. This immediately got rid of those instances of CompoundFileReader.CSIndexInput in my dev environment!!!! Yeeees!

But in my dev environment I tested my additions by slamming my app against a *single* index. I took my modified Lucene to production, and quickly saw all those o.a.l.index.* objects accumulate again. I also see a lot of ThreadLocal's kids:

 16:    419387    13420384  java.lang.ThreadLocal$ThreadLocalMap$Entry

I *think* that points out to some issues with how that ThreadLocal is used there, in a multi-threaded, multi-index environments. I'm running JDK 6, and while this problem sounds a bit like LUCENE-436, I'm not yet sure if it's the same thing. Because my IndexSearchers (and thus all those o.a.l.index.* objects) are long-lived, and threads are shared and reused for searching of other indices, those close() and doClose() methods are not called at the end of the request life-cycle, so at the end of the request those TL instances will *still* have something in them. When their thread is later reused for searching of another index, new data will be put in them, but the old data will never be cleaned out! No? It seems a bit odd, but with this ThreadLocals, shouldn't a multi- threaded, multi-index webapp really have to "clean" those ThreadLocal instances either before or at the end of the request?

I'm running out of ideas, and was wondering if anyone has any thoughts about what could still be holding references to the above classes. I have some 20-30MB memory snapshots (via YourKit) and heap dumps (via jmap), if anyone is interested.

Thanks,
Otis






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