We programmers some times add too much defensive code in order to protect ourselves from the caller not asserting preconditions before making the call. So for e.g. if we have to save a file in some directory, we would first go and check if the directory exists and if it exists then create the file. Now NFS is not designed to work at cloud scale and we saw lots of calls just stuck in file.exists call in threaddumps. The solution was simple, some of these directories could be created at tomcat startup or app node installer can create them. Also some code can assume that directory exists and if if gets a FileNotFoundExcpetion then create it and retry the operation. Removing these defensive coding practices reduced a lot of unnecessary stat calls on filers and improved performance. This is just an example but similar pattern can be observed in other areas of the code and fixed. Defensive programming is good but too much of it is bad and can be improved by making some assumptions or providing better documentation of the api.
Update: This JSP does not work on a thread that is inside some native code. On many occasions I had a thread stuck in JNI code and it wont work. Also in some cases thread.stop can cause jvm to hang. According to javadocs " This method is inherently unsafe. Stopping a thread with Thread.stop causes it to unlock all of the monitors that it has locked". I have used it only in some rare occasions where I wanted to avoid a system shutdown and in some cases we ended up doing system shutdown as jvm was hung so I had a 70-80% success with it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We had an interesting requirement. A tomcat thread that was spawned from an ExecutorService ThreadPool had gone Rogue and was causing lots of disk churning issues. We cant bring down the production server as that would involve downtime. Killing this thread was harmless but how to kill it, t
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