Question

Is it feasible to attach a native thread permanently to the JVM (AttachCurrentThread) (or) is it better to attach when ever required (calling java functions) and detach immediately once the work is done

I wrote a sample native app with the above cases, didn’t find any difference. But by googling, vaguely I came to know that, when attached to JVM , JVMs thread scheduling is responsible for scheduling else OS will schedule the native thread (if not attached). Is this true?

It is important to detach any thread that has been previously attached; otherwise, the program will not exit when you call DestroyJavaVM. – http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/Programming/JDCBook/jniref.html#attach

Will there by any performance issues?
Please let me know if anyone knows, its one my important design aspect.

Thanks & Regards.

Answer 1

Generally speaking, the main performance cost is the thread creation at OS level. Either the thread is creating natively and then attached or directly created as java.lang.Thread from Java API.

If you re-use the same native thread, performance will be good. By the way, do not create dozens of native threads.

The JVM does not schedule threads itself. It may force them in sleep state for various reason like garbage collection. In that specific case, it has to wait for a JNI call from a native thread before collecting. So you have to avoid too long code execution without JNI call to keep the VM heap consumption low.

Moreover, you have to take care to call DeleteLocalRef before detaching a native thread or else your VM will leak memory.