In my previous post, I talked about my war on new Boolean() and how this was improving the code by reducing object overhead. Fortunately, all of these changes have now been merged, and we’re a step closer to having no additional Boolean instances in memory. Well, actually that’s not true; if you use getField().get() on a boolean value, you get a new Boolean() instance created instead of a pointer to Boolean.TRUE or Boolean.FALSE. Oh well …

So the second part of my optimisation is talking about speeding up Eclipse’s launching. I’ve been looking through what happens when an Eclipse instance starts in order to determine where we can optimise the start-up process. I initially started this by running a new Eclipse instance, but this proved to be variable and in any case too big to measure or optimise appropriately. Instead, I switched focus to running a simple Eclipse 4 based application product, created by File → New → Project → Eclipse 4 → Eclipes 4 Application Product. This provides a simple window, but importantly depends on everything that is needed to bring up an Eclipse instance. So if we can optimise that, we can optimise Eclipse!

To determine where the time is spent, Eclipse has some debug options which can be enabled with tracing. If you don’t know about Eclipse tracing, it’s essentially a bunch of key=value pairs that you can set (like -D) but specified in a .options file instead of on the command line. Tracing options can be set when launching an Eclipse application by going to the launch configuration, and going to the Tracing tab. Each bundle has possible debug options (specified in a .options file inside the bundle itself) which can be enabled; if the org.eclipse.osgi bundle is selected then this will switch on general debug for this bundle (although there are other switches which can be enabled as well).

Running Eclipse with this will show how long it takes to start up:

Debug options:
    file:/.../.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.pde.core/Empty.product/.options loaded
Time to load bundles: 24
Starting application: 620
Application Started: 1757

OK, this gives a high level view of how long it takes to start up based on the time taken to display a window. 1.7-1.8s on my laptop is not abnormal for an empty window, but it’s not great. (Your environment will vary.)

Note that the first run is almost certainly invalid; when Equinox starts up, it generates a lot of cached information and stores that in a set of files, which it will re-read a second time. You can either measure the cold start by deleting the workspace each time, or you can measure a warm start by ignoring the first one and then running a second time. In fact, running a few times makes sense; the OS will cache the JAR files in memory and so these can vary between results depending on availability of operating system.

(An empty product doesn’t take up much memory; however, size the JVM so that it doesn’t incur a GC during start-up. This will allow more repeatable measurements to be made between runs. Either pick a big number, or use -verbose:gc if you want to verify that a GC run isn’t happening. Ideally, use this to pick a JVM size you know isn’t going to GC and then remove the -verbose:gc flag so that it doesn’t impact the measurements.)

So, we’ve got a product and we’re running it to give us a number. Time to make the number go down. How do we do that?

First, we need to understand what’s happening at start-up. The messages before printing out Time to load bundles are messages from the Equinox framework booting up and initialising the classes specified in the config.ini file. This runs the org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator bundle, which reads a file bundles.info in a similarly named directory. This is the file that it’s printing out the Time to load bundles message, and there’s not much that can be improved here.

Equinox then moves onto starting the framework by raising the start level. As the levels increase, bundles are started corresponding to their individual start level, which is in the bundles.info. This is what brings up Declarative Services and the Event Admin in level 2, for example. Once the start level has been increased, and all of the bundles have been started or lazily started by then, the application launcher then hands it over to the EclipseAppLauncher which passes it into the application’s run() method. There’s a listener which is passed back by the application when it’s up (IApplicationContext has an applicationRunning() method) which is also the same one used to hide the splash screen.

OK, so each part of these in itself is pretty understandable, and pretty tight. There will always be a part that is proportional to the number of bundles involved (the bundles.info has one line per installed bundle) but otherwise this is pretty lean. So where does the time go?

In short, loading and defining classes from disk. When you run a Java class, the JVM has to be able to acquire the bytes and define the class itself. Similarly when calling a method, any referenced arguments and exceptions have to be loaded. Fortunately Java is pretty good at this, and is intelligent so that when you define a class you don’t immediately need to define all of the referenced classes; only when you use them for the first time.

However, there are things that run when classes are defined. Firstly, a class may have static blocks that have code associated with it – although that only gets run once the class’ static (or instance) contents are accessed for the first time. This is a little like the constructor but at the class level instead of the instance level. The bottom line is if you have a block that contains blocking or long processing, accessing the class’ fields will incur a hit for the first time.

The other thing – unique to OSGi – is that a bundle’s Bundle-Activator will be run if a class is accessed from the bundle, and the bundle is set to start lazily (i.e. when a bundle is accessed for the first time). The net effect is that whilst simply referring to a class won’t necessarily run its static blocks, simply accessing it from a remote bundle may cause that bundle to be started, and hence load its activator.

Activators are bad.

Well, in general they aren’t, but they can often cause delays in bundle start-up. For example, in Eclipse 4.5, the contenttype bundle’s Activator referred to Eclipse’s extension registry which meant that because the extension registry’s interface was referenced the extension registry bundle was started. This of course takes some time to load (a few hundred ms on average) which meant the bundle activator for the contenttype bundle was blocked until the registry finished starting.

In theory, Eclipse can start bundles asynchronously – though at the moment, it doesn’t – but when you have a blocking sequence of activators there’s nothing much that Equinox can do. You can see how long an activator takes to run if you enable the org.eclipse.osgi/debug/bundleLoad tracing option:

Starting org.eclipse.core.contenttype_3.5.0.v20150421-2214 [33]
Starting org.eclipse.equinox.registry_3.6.0.v20150318-1503 [43]
End starting org.eclipse.equinox.registry_3.6.0.v20150318-1503 [43] 36
Starting org.eclipse.equinox.preferences_3.5.300.v20150408-1437 [5]
End starting org.eclipse.equinox.preferences_3.5.300.v20150408-1437 [5] 25
End starting org.eclipse.core.contenttype_3.5.0.v20150421-2214 [33] 68

Here, contenttype is starting, which (serially) is starting the registry and preference bundles, before itself finishing start. The number at the end is in ms but it only represents the total time for the start() method to run; any other items (including defining the actual classes themselves) are effectively hidden here. (We can run this against a 4.6 nightly to see the time taken to define the activator which is new.)

So, removing the Activator can speed up some time – albeit only a little – by removing the need for the bundle to be lazily started. In general, activators do one of three things:

• Set up data structures or load them from disk (preferences, registry)
• Acquire references to the BundleContext
• Acquire references to other services (either through the BundleContext directly or through a ServiceTracker)

The first case there’s not much that can be done. There’s a possibility that the code could be moved to provide a cache-on-demand style lazy accessor instead of up front; but in the case of the Equinox registry or preference service they’d be needed on start-up anyway (and they’re already pretty well optimised).

The second one can trivially be replaced with a call to FrameworkUtil.getBundle(the.class).getBundleContext() where needed. This is actually a pretty fast operation; the bundle is associated with the class’ ClassLoader, so the net effect is that it boils down to something like the.class.getClassLoader().getBundle() which is pretty fast.

The third one can be replaced by moving the components that require the services to a declarative services component. This has the advantage that DS can bring up components in an asynchronous manner and use dependency graph to bring them up in the right order. In fact, in the case of some of the bundles in the Eclipse platform, they were already being brought up by DS but the connection to the other services was outside of DS itself. By moving everything into DS, the pattern is simplified and the code can be removed.

Put all this together, and to date four activators have been removed from Eclipse 4.6:

• org.eclipse.core.contenttype
• org.eclipse.e4.core.commands
• org.eclipse.e4.core.di.extensions
• org.eclipse.jface

So, Eclipse 4.6 is faster at starting up, right? Well, no … it turns out that the empty project is now loading more classes than before. We’re not loading four activators (yay!) but now we’re loading a bunch more classes.

It turns out that it’s a new bug in that it’s new code, added to a static block of CSSRenderingUtils that adds a single image to JFaceResources internal ImageRegistry:

static {
  URL url = ...
  ImageDescriptor desc = ImageDescriptor.createFromURL(url);
  if (desc != null) {
    JFaceResources.getImageRegistry().put(DRAG_HANDLE, desc);
  }
}

That’s all it takes to activate the JFace bundle (formerly; activating the JFaceActivator too) and to trigger the creation of the image registry (which includes auto-populating it). Doesn’t sound like much, but the image registry hits in the order of 40 separate images, using constants referenced from any number of classes (which themselves are then loaded and defined …)

(JFace should support a deferred image loader; but that’s a different issue)

You can measure the amount of code that gets loaded by enabling another trace option; org.eclipse.ogsi/debug/loader. This will spit out a (large) log which shows which classes are being defined and how many bytes they take. It’s best to log this to a file so you can look through it afterwards; it’s too big for the Eclipse console view to hold all in one go.

You can grep for classes defined with 'grep defined log.txt' – piping this through wc -l will show how many classes get loaded during a run of the application. (This was the clue that JFace’s ImageRegistry was being hit, since it showed up as a diff between that and the same project running in Eclipse 4.5.) You can also figure out how much stuff is being loaded; grepping for ‘bytes’ and then piping the second column will give you the number of bytes that were being loaded. In fact, it’s possible to sum these all up:

grep bytes log.txt | awk -- 'BEGIN {sum=0} {sum += $2} END {print sum}'

It turns out this single change added around 20 classes to the startup of an otherwise empty Eclipse 4 application, and an extra 100k of classes (not to mention the number of bytes of images being defined).

Why do I mention all this? Well, this isn’t about this specific change as such (after all, I broke the build not once but twice yesterday, and possibly a third time as well) – but it’s more to highlight a few things:

• Activators are generally not required, and can be replaced
• The amount of time Eclipse spends loading is proportional to the number and size of classes being loaded
• It’s really easy to add static dependencies between classes which then trigger performance problems later on

Fortunately the size of an application’s loaded classes can be measured, as can the time. So we can show whether or not we’re moving in the right direction – and there are also Eclipse performance tests which look at other factors. But it’s really easy to move the wrong way on the performance profile, and only by identifying what’s on the (serial) critical path and removing unnecessary cruft are we going to speed up Eclipse’s launch process.

PS algorithm choices matter a lot more than micro-optimisations like these, and in general use the JIT will do a lot of the optimisations for you. However, start-up is a ‘special’ case; it only runs once (so most of it won’t be JITted) and even though Equinox’s classloader is re-entrant (and so can handle multiple threads) the declaration of classes is mainly single-threaded. Only bundles whose components are instantiated from declarative services are going to be able to benefit from multi-threaded startup. So; Activator bad, DS good and avoid expensive static blocks are the takeaways here.