GC Issue 120: Determine mechanism for controlling automatic shutdown of Agents, with a default policy and mechanism for changing that policy as needed
Description
Environment
Attachments
- 23 Aug 2014, 05:49 PM
- 01 Aug 2014, 12:39 AM
Activity
Andy Fingerhut August 23, 2014 at 5:49 PM
Patch clj-124-daemonthreads-v1.patch dated Aug 23 2014 simply modifies the ThreadFactory so that every thread created in an agent thread pool is a daemon thread.
Andy Fingerhut August 1, 2014 at 12:39 AM
Patch clj-124-v1.patch dated Jul 31 2014 implements the approach of calling clojure.lang.Agent#shutdown when the new Var *auto-shutdown-agents* is true, which is its default value.
I don't see any benefit to making this Var dynamic. Unless I am missing something, only the root binding value is visible after clojure.main/main returns, not any binding that would be pushed on top of that if it were dynamic. It seems to require alter-var-root to change it to false in a way that this patch would avoid calling clojure.lang.Agent#shutdown.
This patch only adds the shutdown call to clojure.main#main, but can easily be added to the legacy_repl and legacy_script methods if desired.
Andy Fingerhut November 28, 2012 at 12:11 AM
Rereading the original description of this ticket, without reading all of the comments that follow, that description is still right on target for the behavior of latest Clojure master today.
People send messages to the Clojure Google group every couple of months hitting this issue, and one even filed CLJ-959 because of hitting it. I have updated the examples on ClojureDocs.org for future, and also for pmap and clojure.java.shell/sh which use future in their implementations, to warn people about this and explain that they should call (shutdown-agents), but making it unnecessary to call shutdown-agents would be even better, at least as the default behavior. It sounds fine to me to provide a way for experts on thread behavior to change that default behavior if they need to.
Chas Emerick November 27, 2012 at 11:56 PM
Heh, blast from the past.
The comment import appears to have set their timestamps to the date of the import, so the conversation is pretty hard to follow, and obviously doesn't benefit from the intervening years of experience. In addition, there have been plenty of changes to agents, including some recent enhancements that address some of the pain points that Alex Miller mentioned above.
I propose closing this as 'invalid' or whatever, and opening one or more new issues to track whatever issues still persist (presumably based on fresh ML discussion, etc).
Christopher Redinger November 27, 2012 at 9:47 PM
Moving this ticket out of approval "OK" status, and dropping the priority. These were Assembla import defaults.
Also, Chas gets to be the Reporter now.
Details
Assignee
Alex MillerAlex MillerReporter
Chas EmerickChas EmerickLabels
Approval
VettedPatch
CodePriority
MinorAffects versions
Details
Details
Assignee
Reporter
Labels
Approval
Patch
Priority
Minor
The original description when this ticket was vetted is below, starting with "Reported by cemer...@snowtide.com, June 01, 2009". This prefix attempts to summarize the issue and discussion.
Description:
Several Clojure functions involving agents and futures, such as future, pmap, clojure.java.shell/sh, and a few others, create non-daemon threads in the JVM in an ExecutorService called soloExecutor created via Executors#newCachedThreadPool. The javadocs for this method here http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/Executors.html#newCachedThreadPool%28%29 say "Threads that have not been used for sixty seconds are terminated and removed from the cache." This causes a 60-second wait after a Clojure program is done before the JVM process exits. Questions about this confusing behavior come up a couple of times per year on the Clojure Google group. Search for "shutdown-agents" to find most of these occurrences, since calling (shutdown-agents) at the end of one's program typically eliminates this 60-second wait.
Example:
% java -cp clojure.jar clojure.main -e "(println 1)" 1 [ this case exits quickly ] % java -cp clojure.jar clojure.main -e "(println @(future 1))" 1 [ 60-second pause before process exits, at least on many platforms and JVMs ]Summary of comments before July 2014:
Most of the comments on this ticket on or before August 23, 2010 were likely spread out in time before being imported from the older ticket tracking system into JIRA. Most of them refer to an older suggested patch that is not in JIRA, and compilation problems it had with JDK 1.5, which is no longer supported by Clojure 1.6.0. I think these comments can be safely ignored now.
Alex Miller blogged about this and related issues here: http://tech.puredanger.com/2010/06/08/clojure-agent-thread-pools/
Since then, two of the suggestions Alex raised have been addressed. One by https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/CLJ-378#icft=CLJ-378 and one by the addition of set-agent-send-executor! and similar functions to Clojure 1.5.0: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/changes.md#23-clojurecoreset-agent-send-executor-set-agent-send-off-executor-and-send-via
One remaining issue is the topic of this ticket, which is how best to avoid this 60-second pause.
Approach #1: automatically shut down agents
One method is mentioned in Chas Emerick's original description below, suggested by Rich Hickey, but perhaps long enough ago he may no longer endorse it: Create a Var *auto-shutdown-agents* that when true (the default value), clojure.lang.Agent shutdown() is called after the clojure.main entry point. This removes the surprising wait for common methods of starting Clojure, while allowing expert users to change that value to false if desired.
Approach #2: create daemon threads by default
Another method mentioned by several people in the comments is to change the threads created in agent thread pools to daemon threads by default, and perhaps to deprecate shutdown-agents or modify it to be less dangerous. That approach is discussed a bit more in Alex's blog post linked above, and in a comment from Alexander Taggart on July 11, 2011 below.
Approach #3:
The only other comment before 2014 that is not elaborated in this summary is shoover's suggestion: There are already well-defined and intuitive ways to block on agents and futures. Why not deprecate shutdown-agents and force users to call await and deref if they really want to block? In the pmap situation one would have to evaluate the pmap form.
Approach #4: Create a cached thread pool with a timeout much lower than 60 seconds
This could be done by using one of the ThreadPoolExecutor constructors with a keepAliveTime parameter of the desired time.
Patch: clj-124-v1.patch clj-124-daemonthreads-v1.patch
At most one of these patches should be considered, depending upon the desired approach to take.
Patch clj-124-v1.patch implements appproach #1 using *auto-shutdown-agents*. See the Jul 31 2014 comment when this patch was added for some additional details.
Patch clj-124-daemonthreads-v1.patch implements approach #2 and is straightforward.
Reported by cemer...@snowtide.com, Jun 01, 2009 There has been intermittent chatter over the past months from a couple of people on the group (e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/409054e3542adc1f) and in #clojure about some clojure scripts hanging, either for a constant time (usually reported as a minute or so with no CPU util) or seemingly forever (or until someone kills the process). I just hit a similar situation in our compilation process, which invokes clojure.lang.Compile from ant. The build process for this particular project had taken 15 second or so, but after adding a couple of pmap calls, that build time jumped to ~1:15, with roughly zero CPU utilization over the course of that last minute. Adding a call to Agent.shutdown() in the finally block in clojure.lang.Compile/main resolved the problem; a patch including this change is attached. I wouldn't suspect anyone would have any issues with such a change. ----- In general, it doesn't seem like everyone should keep tripping over this problem in different directions. It's a very difficult thing to debug if you're not attuned to how clojure's concurrency primitives work under the hood, and I would bet that newer users would be particularly affected. After discussion in #clojure, rhickey suggested adding a *auto-shutdown-agents* var, which: - if true when exiting one of the main entry points (clojure.main, or the legacy script/repl entry points), Agent.shutdown() would be called, allowing for the clean exit of the application - would be bound by default to true - could be easily set to false for anyone with an advanced use-case that requires agents to remain active after the main thread of the application exits. This would obviously not help anyone initializing clojure from a different entry point, but this may represent the best compromise between least-surprise and maximal functionality for advanced users. ------ In addition to the above, it perhaps might be worthwhile to change the keepalive values used to create the Threadpools used by c.l.Actor's Executors. Currently, Actor uses a default thread pool executor, which results in a 60s keepalive. Lowering this to something much smaller (1s? 5s?) would additionally minimize the impact of Agent's threadpools on Java applications that embed clojure directly (and would therefore not benefit from *auto-shutdown-agents* as currently conceived, leading to puzzling 'hanging' behaviour). I'm not in a position to determine what impact this would have on performance due to thread churn, but it would at least minimize what would be perceived as undesirable behaviour by users that are less familiar with the implementation details of Agent and code that depends on it. Comment 1 by cemer...@snowtide.com, Jun 01, 2009 Just FYI, I'd be happy to provide patches for either of the suggestions mentioned above...