It is mentioned at multiple posts: improper use of ThreadLocal
causes Memory Leak. I am struggling to understand how Memory Leak would happen using ThreadLocal
.
The only scenario I have figured out it as below:
A web-server maintains a pool of Threads (e.g. for servlets). Those threads can create memory leak if the variables in
ThreadLocal
are not removed because Threads do not die.
This scenario does not mention "Perm Space" memory leak. Is that the only (major) use case of memory leak?
PermGen exhaustions in combination with ThreadLocal
are often caused by classloader leaks.
An example:
Imagine an application server which has a pool of worker threads.
They will be kept alive until application server termination.
A deployed web application uses a static ThreadLocal
in one of its classes in order to store some thread-local data, an instance of another class (lets call it SomeClass
) of the web application. This is done within the worker thread (e.g. this action originates from a HTTP request).
Important:
By definition, a reference to a ThreadLocal
value is kept until the "owning" thread dies or if the ThreadLocal itself is no longer reachable.
If the web application fails to clear the reference to the ThreadLocal
on shutdown, bad things will happen:
Because the worker thread will usually never die and the reference to the ThreadLocal
is static, the ThreadLocal
value still references the instance of SomeClass
, a web application's class - even if the web application has been stopped!
As a consequence, the web application's classloader cannot be garbage collected, which means that all classes (and all static data) of the web application remain loaded (this affects the PermGen memory pool as well as the heap).
Every redeployment iteration of the web application will increase permgen (and heap) usage.
=> This is the permgen leak
One popular example of this kind of leak is this bug in log4j (fixed in the meanwhile).