microsoft / microsoft/gctoolkit

Handle clock rollbacks

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#127 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
Java
Stars
1.3k
Forks
177
Avg merge
1d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

Currently in Censum, the expectation is a monotonically increasing clock value. In reality, clocks are not monotonic and in those cases the clock can travel backwards. This leads to potential errors in downstream calculations. ATM there isn't much that can be done with this except detect it and offer a warning. The NTP RFC specifies jumps of approximately 100ms. NTP favours forward jumps and as it happens, this is the most common use case (generally due to local thermal conditions in the pizza box).

In other cases this is simply a case of log corruption. The most common case is that two separate GC logs have been concatenated together. In this case the most sensible thing to do would to offer a warning that the clock rollbacked back and then halt the parsing.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing Censum's GC log parsing and clock-handling paths, then inspect how existing warnings and parse failures are reported. Done means backward clock movement is detected, a warning is offered, and parsing halts for corrupted or concatenated logs.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
performance, tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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