We had this deadlock-like behavior where the UI froze sometimes when performing a particular action. But when run with our profiler, it did not report a deadlock when it froze.
After hours of tracing, the cause was identified as an infinite loop on the HashMap.get() method, running in the AWT Event Dispatch thread. The HashMap is the constraints object in a javax.swing.SpringLayout. Why would that happen???
More tracing revealed that there were multiple threads trying to add components to this container, triggering SpringLayout to add new constraints to its map. With reasonable luck the map hits its threshold and tries to resize itself. If you understand hashing you know that this is when it picks a new table size and re-hashes all the objects into its new buckets. When two of this happen at the same time the linked list screws up, and with more luck a later element in the link list points to the next element which is earlier in the same list. The worse part is this is a hidden problem, it doesn’t “surface” until you try to get() an object that’s even later than the later element, that’s when it iterates the bucket past the later element, back to the earlier element, and repeats.
The typical solution to swap the HashMap for a Hashtable is not available here, because the map exists in the core JDK. So it’s a good time to re-iterate to the team the significance of “single threaded model” of AWT/Swing. To be explicit, this issue was resolved by queuing the adding of components to the container on the Event Dispatch thread. Of course a more direct approach would be to synchronize the points where the components were added, but you shouldn’t be doing such things outside the AWT Event Dispatch thread anyway.
When I googled about the HashMap.get() infinite loop I realize it occurs in other areas as well, e.g. a Servlet’s session may be represented as a HashMap. Concurrent put()s and then a get() can cause the same problem.