Debugging Concurrency Issues with OpenJDK Jcstress

Debugging Concurrency Issues with OpenJDK Jcstress

I fell in love with the Java Microbenchmarking Harness (JMH) a few months ago since (in my opinion) it is the only sane way to do microbenchmarks of JVM code right now. I also poked around on their website for other tools they provide, and found that there is another very interesting tool called jcstress. It stands for Java Concurrency Stress tests and is used mainly by the OpenJDK people itself to make sure their code works correctly with regards to concurrency.

As always, you need a motivating factor so today a ticket got opened which reported a race condition inside a utility class in the spymemcached library (which is also used by the Couchbase Java SDK). Before coming up with complicated code that simulates multi-threaded consumers of the API I thought I could just try out jcstress first.

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