Deadlock detection in Java

Since JDK 1.5 there are very useful methods in the java.lang.management package to find and inspect deadlocks that occurs. See the findMonitorDeadlockedThreads() and findDeadlockedThreads() method of the ThreadMXBean class.

A possible way to use this is to have a separate watchdog thread (or periodic task) that does this.

Sample code:

  ThreadMXBean tmx = ManagementFactory.getThreadMXBean();
  long[] ids = tmx.findDeadlockedThreads();
  if (ids != null) {
     ThreadInfo[] infos = tmx.getThreadInfo(ids, true, true);
     System.out.println("The following threads are deadlocked:");
     for (ThreadInfo ti : infos) {
        System.out.println(ti);
     }
  }

JConsole is able to detect deadlocks in a running application.

JDK 5 and 6 will dump held lock information in a full thread dump (obtained with kill -3, jstack, jconsole, etc). JDK 6 even contains information about ReentrantLock and ReentrantReadWriteLock. It is possible from this information to diagnose a deadlock by finding a lock cycle: Thread A holds lock 1, Thread B holds lock 2, and either A is requesting 2 or B is requesting 1. From my experience, this is usually pretty obvious.

Other analysis tools can actually find potential deadlocks even if they don't occur. Thread tools from vendors like OptimizeIt, JProbe, Coverity, etc are good places to look.

In general java does not offer deadlock detection. The synchronized keyword and built in monitors make it somewhat more difficult to reason about deadlock than in languages with explicit locking.

I would suggest migrating to using java.util.concurrent.Lock locks and the like in order to make your locking schemes easier to reason about. In fact you could easily make your own implementation of the lock interface with deadlock detection. The algorithm is to basically traverse the lock dependency graph and look for a cycle.

Deadlocks can be avoided if you follow a simple rule: have all threads claim and release their locks in the same order. In this way, you never get into a situation where a deadlock can occur.

Even the dining philosophers problem can be seen as a violation of this rule as it uses relative concepts of left and right spoon which result in different threads using different allocation orders of the spoons. If the spoons were numbered uniquely and the philosophers all tried to get the lowest numbered spoon first, deadlock would be impossible.

In my opinion, prevention is better than cure.

This is one of the two guidelines I like to follow to ensure threads work properly. The other is ensuring each thread is solely responsible for its own execution as it's the only one fully aware of what it's doing at any point in time.

So that means no Thread.stop calls, use a global flag (or message queue or something like that) to tell another thread you want action taken. Then let that thread do the actual work.

If you are on Java 5 you can call the method findMonitorDeadlockedThreads() on the ThreadMXBean which you can get through a call of java.lang.management.ManagementFactory.getThreadMXBean(). This will find deadlocks caused by object monitors only. On Java 6 there's findDeadlockedThreads() which will also find deadlocks caused by "ownable synchronizers (for example ReentrandLock and ReentrantReadWriteLock).

Be aware that it will probably be expensive to call these methods, so they should be used for troubleshooting purposes only.

Not exactly what you asked, but when a deadlock does occur, you can do a "kill -3" on the process id and it dumps a thread dump to stdout. Also, the 1.6 jvm has some tools to do the same thing in a gui manner.

If you are running from the command-line and you suspect that you are deadlocked, try ctrl+break in windows (ctrl+\ in unix) to get a thread dump. See http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/trouble/TSG-VM/html/gbmps.html

Dr. Heinz Kabutz of JavaSpecialists has written an entertaining and informative newsletter issue on Java deadlocks and describes something called a ThreadMXBean in another newsletter issue. Between those, you should get a good idea of the issues and some pointers to doing your own instrumentation.

If you're debugging in eclipse, you can pause the application (select the app in the debug view and the little || button on the debug toolbar) and then it can report deadlocks.

See http://runnerwhocodes.blogspot.com/2007/10/deadlock-detection-with-eclipse.html for an example.

Java 1.8 onwards, you can easily find if your program has a deadlock by using jcmd command on your terminal.

1. Run jcmd on your terminal: It lists all the programs (PID and name) which are using Java.
2. Now, run jcmd <PID> Thread.print: This will print the thread dump on your console and will also print if your program has a deadlock.

You can analyse your Java program with more jcmd options listed by command jcmd <PID> help