Blocking violations in reactive Java frameworks

Sammanfattning: Concurrency in programming is a way of interleaving tasks in order to enhance the performance of an application. Previous research has found that concurrency errors are hard to avoid, hard to find, and that they often degrade performance of the application. Reactive programming provides an abstraction, to make it easier to implement complex concurrent and asynchronous tasks. When programming reactively in Java, it is often done with a reactive framework, where RxJava and Project-Reactor are two of the more popular choices. Blocking a thread that is not supposed to be blocked will result in concurrency errors, without the Java compiler providing a warning. In order to find incorrect blocking, a tool called BlockHound can be used. BlockHound wraps the original code, intercepts any blocking calls, and provides an error if the blocking call was used incorrectly. In this study, BlockHound was used to detect erroneous blocking calls in open source projects which use RxJava or Project-Reactor. A JavaAgent was created to automate the process of adding BlockHound to a project. The selection of projects to test was done by evaluating the community usage, and selecting the projects with the most amount of stars and forks, as this indicates that the projects are widely used. The projects were tested with BlockHound, and the errors were saved to external log files for analysation. The study found that a considerable percentage of the projects investigated exhibited blocking violations. These violations were all caused by a low number of system calls, made from methods in threads that forbid blocking. Generalizable solutions to the violations were applied, and considered successful.