What does flushing thread local memory to global memory mean?

Question

I am aware that the purpose of volatile variables in Java is that writes to such variables are immediately visible to other threads. I am also aware that one of the effects

Answer 1

The flush you are talking about is known as a "memory barrier". It means that the CPU makes sure that what it sees of the RAM is also viewable from other CPU/cores. It implies two things:

• The JIT compiler flushes the CPU registers. Normally, the code may kept a copy of some globally visible data (e.g. instance field contents) in CPU registers. Registers cannot be seen from other threads. Thus, half the work of synchronized is to make sure that no such cache is maintained.

• The synchronized implementation also performs a memory barrier to make sure that all the changes to RAM from the current core are propagated to main RAM (or that at least all other cores are aware that this core has the latest values -- cache coherency protocols can be quite complex).

The second job is trivial on uniprocessor systems (I mean, systems with a single CPU which has as single core) but uniprocessor systems tend to become rarer nowadays.

As for thread-local heaps, this can theoretically be done, but it is usually not worth the effort because nothing tells what parts of the memory are to be flushed with a synchronized. This is a limitation of the threads-with-shared-memory model: all memory is supposed to be shared. At the first encountered synchronized, the JVM should then flush all its "thread-local heap objects" to the main RAM.

Yet recent JVM from Sun can perform an "escape analysis" in which a JVM succeeds in proving that some instances never become visible from other threads. This is typical of, for instance, StringBuilder instances created by javac to handle concatenation of strings. If the instance is never passed as parameter to other methods then it does not become "globally visible". This makes it eligible for a thread-local heap allocation, or even, under the right circumstances, for stack-based allocation. Note that in this situation there is no duplication; the instance is not in "two places at the same time". It is only that the JVM can keep the instance in a private place which does not incur the cost of a memory barrier.