[#CLJ-1125] Clojure can leak memory when used in a servlet container - Clojure JIRA

Details

Type: Defect
Status: Open
Priority: Major
Resolution: Unresolved
Affects Version/s: None
Fix Version/s: Release 1.6
Component/s: None
Labels:
None

Patch:
Code
Approval:
Incomplete

Description

When used within a servlet container
(Jetty/Tomcat/JBossAS/Immutant/etc), the thread locals Var.dvals (used
to store dynamic bindings) and LockingTransaction.transaction (used to
store the currently active transaction(s)) prevent all of the classes
loaded by an application's clojure runtime from being garbage collected,
resulting in a memory leak.

The issue comes from threads living beyond the lifetime of a
deployment - servlet containers use thread pools that are shared
across all applications within the container. Currently, the dvals and
transaction thread locals are not discarded when they are no longer
needed, causing their contents to retain a hard reference to their
classloaders, which, in turn, causes all of the classes loaded under
the application's classloader to be retained until the thread exits
(which is generally at JVM shutdown).

I've attached a patch that does the following:

Var.dvals is now removed when the thread bindings are popped
Var.dvals no longer has an initialValue, so checking to see if it is
set will no longer set it to an empty Frame
The outer transaction in LockingTransaction.transaction now removes
the thread local when it is finished

There is still the opportunity for memory leaks if agents or futures
are used, and the executors used for them are not shutdown when the
app is undeployed. That's a solvable problem, but should probably be
solved by the containers themselves (and/or the war generation tools)
instead of in clojure itself.

This patch has a small performance impact: its use of a try/finally
around running transactions to remove the outer transaction adds
4-6 microseconds to each transaction call on my hardware.

Providing an automated test for this patch is difficult - I've tested
it locally with repeated deployments to a container while monitoring
GC and permgen. All of clojure's tests pass with it applied.

The above is a condensation of:
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/clojure-dev/3CXDe8_9G58/discussion

I'm happy to provide whatever feedback/work is needed to get this
applied.