typelevel / typelevel/cats-effect

Thread tracking

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Dominant language
Scala
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Most IO programs are naturally asynchronous, so it is generally the case that a fiber can be bound to many potentially several different threads throughout its lifetime. Additionally, since users have control of the thread pool that fibers run on (i.e. async in CE2, shift), it's very easy to end up hogging a thread pool that shouldn't be. As part of the tracing feature set, we should offer users a way to easily observe what thread(s) a fiber has been bound to during its execution. Include that information in the trace buffer that already holds stack traces, and render them accordingly.

A fiber can only switch threads is at an asynchronous boundary, so we really just need to call Thread.currentThread() after
one is encountered and push that information to the IOEvent trace buffer. This behavior should be configurable. If it's not enabled, there should be negligible performance impact (similar to the stack tracing system property).

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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 the existing stack-trace trace buffer and IOEvent handling around asynchronous boundaries. Determine how Thread.currentThread() data should be stored and rendered, then verify that the behavior is configurable and has negligible impact when disabled.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
scala
Domain
backend, observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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