The Pain of Broken Subprocess Management on JDK

I prefer to write happy posts...I really do. But tonight I'm completely defeated by the JDK's implementation of subprocess launching, and I need to tell the world why.

JRuby has always strived to mimic MRI's behavior as much as possible, which in many cases has meant we need to route around the JDK to get at true POSIX APIs and behaviors.

For example, JRuby has provided the ability to manipulate symbolic links since well before Java 7 provided that capability, using a native POSIX subsystem built atop jnr-ffi, our Java-to-C FFI layer (courtesy of Wayne Meissner). Everyone in the Java world knew for years the lack of symlink support was a gross omission, but most folks just sucked it up and went about their business. We could not afford to do that.

We've repeated this process for many other Ruby features: UNIX sockets, libc-like IO, selectable stdin, filesystem attributes...on and on. And we've been able to provide the best POSIX runtime on the JVM bar none. Nobody has gone as far or done as much as JRuby has.

Another area where we've had to route around the JDK is in subprocess launching and management. The JDK provides java.lang.ProcessBuilder, an API for assembling the appropriate pieces of a subprocess launch, producing a java.lang.Process object. Process in turn provides methods to wait for the subprocess, get access to its streams, and destroy it forcibly. It works great, on the surface.

Unfortunately, the cake is a lie.

Under the covers, the JDK implements Process through a complicated series of tricks. We want to be able to interactively control the child process, monitor it for writes, govern its lifecycle exactly. The JDK attempts to provide a consistent experience across all platforms. Unfortunately, those two worlds are not currently compatible, and the resulting experience is consistently awful.

We'll start at the bottom to see where things go wrong.

POSIX, POSIX, Everywhere

At the core of ProcessBuilder, inside the native code behind UNIXProcess, we do find somewhat standard POSIX calls to fork and exec, wrapped up in a native downcall forkAndExec:

The C code behind this is a bit involved, so I'll summarize what it does.

1. Sets up pipes for in, out, err, and fail to communicate with the eventual child process.
2. Copies the parent's descriptors from the pipes into the "fds" array.
3. Launches the child through a fairly standard fork+exec sequence.
4. Waits for the child to write a byte to the fail pipe indicating success or failure.
5. Scrubs the unused sides of the pipes in parent and child.
6. Returns the child process ID.

This is all pretty standard for subprocess launching, and if it proceeded to put those file descriptors into direct, selectable channels we'd have no issues. Unfortunately, things immediately go awry once we return to the Java code.

Interactive?

The call to forkAndExec occurs inside the UNIXProcess constructor, as the very first thing it does. At that point, it has in hand the three standard file descriptors and the subprocess pid, and it knows that the subprocess has at least been successfully forked. The next step is to wrap the file descriptors in appropriate InputStream and OutputStream objects, and this is where we find the first flaw.

This is the code to set up an OutputStream for the input channel of the child process, so we can write to it. Now we know the operating system is going to funnel those written bytes directly to the subprocess's input stream, and ideally if we're launching a subprocess we intend to control it...perhaps by sending it interactive commands. Why, then, do we wrap the file descriptor with a BufferedOutputStream?
This is where JRuby's hacks begin. In our process subsystem, we have the following piece of code, which attempts to unwrap buffering from any stream it is given.

The FieldAccess.getProtectedFieldValue call there does what you think it does...attempt to read the "out" field from within FilteredOutputStream, which in this case will be the FileOutputStream from above. Unwrapping the stream in this way allows us to do two things:

1. We can do unbuffered writes to (or reads from, in the case of the child's out and err streams) the child process.
2. We can get access to the more direct FileChannel for the stream, to do direct ByteBuffer reads and writes or low-level stream copying.

So we're in good shape, right? It's a bit of hackery, but we've got our unbuffered Channel and can interact directly with the subprocess. Is this good enough?

I wish it were.

Selectable?

The second problem we run into is that users very often would like to select against the output streams of the child process, to perform nonblocking IO operations until the child has actually written some data. It gets reported as a JRuby bug over and over again because there's simply no way for us to implement it. Why? Because FileChannel is not selectable.


FileChannel implements methods for random-access reads and writes (positioning) and blocking IO interruption (which NIO implements by closing the stream...that's a rant for another day), but it does not implement any of the logic necessary for doing nonblocking IO using an NIO Selector. This comes up in at least one other place: the JVM's own standard IO streams are also not selectable, which means you can't select for user input at the console. Consistent experience indeed...it seems that all interaction with the user or with processes must be treated as file IO, with no selection capabilities.

(It is interesting to note that the JVM's standard IO streams are *also* wrapped in buffers, which we dutifully unwrap to provide a truly interactive console.)

Why are inter-proces file descriptors, which would support selector operations just wonderfully, wrapped in an unselectable channel? I have no idea, and it's impossible for us to hack around.

Let's not dwell on this item, since there's more to cover.

Fear the Reaper

You may recall I also wanted to have direct control over the lifecycle of the subprocess, to be able to wait for it or kill it at my own discretion. And on the surface, Process appears to provide these capabilities via the waitFor() and destroy() methods. Again it's all smoke and mirrors.

Further down in the UNIXProcess constructor, you'll find this curious piece of code:

For each subprocess started through this API, the JVM will spin up a "process reaper" thread. This thread is designed to monitor the subprocess for liveness and notify the parent UNIXProcess object when that process has died, so it can pass on that information to the user via the waitFor() and exitValue() API calls.

The interesting bit here is the waitForProcessExit(pid) call, which is another native downcall into C land:

There's nothing too peculiar here; this is how you'd wait for the child process to exit if you were writing plain old C code. But there's a sinister detail you can't see just by looking at this code: waitpid can be called exactly once by the parent process.

Part of the Ruby Process API is the ability to get a subprocess PID and wait for it. The concept of a process ID has been around for a long time, and Rubyists (even amateur Rubyists who've never written a line of C code) don't seem to have any problem calling Process.waitpid when they want to wait for a child to exit. JRuby is an implementation of Ruby, and we would ideally like to be able to run all Ruby code that exists, so we also must implement Process.waitpid in some reasonable way. Our choice was to literally call the C function waitpid(2) via our FFI layer.

Here's the subtle language from the wait(2) manpage (which includes waitpid):

RETURN VALUES
     If wait() returns due to a stopped or terminated child
     process, the process ID of the child is returned to the
     calling process.  Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned
     and errno is set to indicate the error.

     If wait3(), wait4(), or waitpid() returns due to a
     stopped or terminated child process, the process ID of
     the child is returned to the calling process.  If there
     are no children not previously awaited, -1 is returned
     with errno set to [ECHILD].  Otherwise, if WNOHANG is
     specified and there are no stopped or exited children,
     0 is returned. If an error is detected or a caught
     signal aborts the call, a value of -1 is returned and
     errno is set to indicate the error.

There's a lot of negatives and passives and conditions there, so I'll spell it out for you more directly: If you call waitpid for a given child PID and someone else in your process has already done so...bad things happen.

We effectively have to race the JDK to the waitpid call. If we get there first, the reaper thread bails out immediately and does no further work. If we don't get their first, it becomes impossible for a Ruby user to waitpid for that child process.

Now you may be saying "why don't you just wait on the Process object and let the JDK do its job, old man? The problem here is that Ruby's Process API behaves like a POSIX process API: you get a PID back, and you wait on that PID. We can't mimic that API without returning a PID and implementing Process.waitpid appropriately.

(Interesting note: we also use reflection tricks to get the real PID out of the java.lang.Process object, since it is not normally exposed.)

Could we have some internal lookup table mapping PIDs to Process objects, and make our wait logic just call Process.waitFor? In order to do so, we'd need to manage a weak-valued map from integers to Process objects...which is certainly doable, but it breaks if someone uses a native library or FFI call to launch a process themselves. Oh, but if it's not in our table we could do waitpid. And so the onion grows more layers, all because we can't simply launch a process, get a PID, and wait on it.

It doesn't end here, though.

Keep Boiling That Ocean

At this point we've managed to at least get interactive streams to the child process, and even if they're not selectable that's a big improvement over the standard API. We've managed to dig out a process ID and sometimes we can successfully wait for it with a normal waitpid function call. So out of our three goals (interactivity, selectability, lifecycle control) we're maybe close to halfway there.

Then the JDK engineers go and pull the rug out from under us.

The logic for UNIXProcess has changed over time. Here's the notable differences in the current JDK 7 codebase:

• An Executor is now used to avoid spinning up a new thread for each child process. I'd +1 this, if the reaping logic weren't already causing me headaches.
• The streams are now instances of UNIXProcess.ProcessPipeOutputStream and ProcessPipeInputStream. Don't get excited...they're still just buffered wrappers around File streams.
• The logic run when the child process exist has changed...with catastrophic consequences.

Here's the new stream setup and reaper logic:

Now instead of simply notifying the UNIXProcess that the child has died, there's a call to processExited().

Ok, doesn't look bad so far. Let's look at ProcessPipeInputStream, which handles output from the child process.

So when the child process exits, the any data waiting to be read from its output stream is drained into a buffer. All of it. In memory.

Did you launch a process that writes a gigabyte of data to its output stream and then terminates? Well, friend, I sure hope you have a gigabyte of memory, because the JDK is going to read that sucker in and there's nothing you can do about it. And let's hope there's not more than 2GB of data, since this code basically just grows a byte[], which in Java can only grow to 2GB. If there's more than 2GB of data on that stream, this logic errors out and the data is lost forever. Oh, and by the way...if you happened to be devlishly clever and managed to dig down to the real FileChannel attached to the child process, all the data from that stream has suddenly disappeared, and the channel itself is closed, even if you never got a chance to read from it. Thanks for the help, JDK.

The JDK has managed to both break our clever workarounds (for its previously broken logic) an break itself even more badly. It's almost like they want to make subprocess launching so dreadfully bad you just don't use it anymore.

Never Surrender

Of course I could cry into my beer over this, but these sorts of problems and challenges are exactly why I'm involved in JRuby and OpenJDK. Obviously this API has gone off the deep end and can't be saved, so what's a hacker to do? In our case, we make our own API.

At this point, that's our only option. The ProcessBuilder and Process APIs are so terribly broken that we can't rely on them anymore. Thankfully, JRuby ships with a solid, fast FFI layer called the Java Native Runtime (JNR) that should make it possible for us to write our own process API entirely in Java. We will of course do that in the open, and we are hoping you will help us.

What's the moral of the story? I don't really know. Perhaps it's that lowest-common-denominator APIs usually trend toward uselessness. Perhaps it's that ignoring POSIX is an expressway to failure. Perhaps it's that I don't know when to quit. In any case, you can count on the JRuby team to continue bringing you the only true POSIX experience on the JVM, and you can count on me to keep pushing OpenJDK to follow our lead.

On Languages, VMs, Optimization, and the Way of the World

I shouldn't be up this late, but I've been doing lots of thinking and exploring tonight.

In studying various VMs over the past few years, I've come up with a list of do's and don't that make things optimize right. These apply to languages, the structures that back them, and the VMs that optimize those languages, and from what I've seen there's a lot of immutable truths here given current optimization technology.

Let's dive in.

#1: Types don't have to be static

JVM and other dynamic-optimizing runtimes have proven this out. At runtime, it's possible to gather the same information static types would provide you at compile time, leading to optimizations at least as good as fully statically-typed, statically-optimized code. In some cases, it may be possible to do a better job, since runtime profiling is based on real execution, real branch percentages, real behavior, rather than a guess at what a program might do. You could probably make the claim that static optimization is a halting problem, and dynamic optimization eventually can beat it by definition since it can optimize what the program is actually doing.

However, this requires one key thing to really work well.

#2: Types need to be predictable

In order for runtime optimization to happen, objects need to have predictable types and those types need to have a predictable structure. This isn't to say that types must be statically declared...they just need to look the same on repeat visits. If objects can change type (smalltalk's become, perl's and C's weak typing) you're forced to include more guards against those changes, or you're forced to invalidate more code whenever something changes (or in the case of C, you just completely shit the bed when things aren't as expected). If change is possible and exposed at a language level, there may be nothing you can do to cope with all those different type shapes, and optimization can only go so far.

This applies both to the shape of a type's method table (methods remaining consistent once encountered) and the shape of the type's instances (predictable object layout). Many dynamically-typed languages impose dynamic type shape and object shape on VMs that run them, preventing those VMs from making useful predictions about how to optimize code. Optimistic predictions (generating synthetic types for known type shapes or preemptively allocating objects based on previously-seen shapes) still have to include fallback logic to maintain the mutable behavior, should it ever be needed. Again, optimization potential is limited, because the shape of the world can change on a whim and the VM has to be vigilent

The alternative summation of #1 and #2 is that types don't have to be statically declared, but they need to be statically defined. Most popular dynamic languages do neither, but all they really need to do is the latter.

#3: You can't cheat the CPU

Regardless of how clever you'd like to be in your code or language or VM or JIT, the limiting factor is how modern CPUs actually run your code. There's a long list of expectations you must meet to squeeze every last drop of speed out of a system, and diverging from those guidelines will always impose a penalty. This is the end...the bottom turtle...the unifying theory. It is, at the end of the day, the CPU you must appease to get the best performance. All other considerations fall out of that, and anywhere performance does not live up to expectations you are guaranteed to discover that someone tried to cheat the CPU.

Traditionally, static typing was the best way to guarantee we produced good CPU instructions. It gave us a clear picture of the world we could ponder and meditate over, eventually boiling out the secrets of the universe and producing the fastest possible code. But that always assumed a narrow vision of a world with unlimited resources. It assumed we could make all the right decisions for a program ahead of time and that no limitations outside our target instruction set would ever affect us. In the real world, however, CPUs have limited cache sizes, multiple threads, bottlenecked memory pipelines, and basic physics to contend with (you can only push so many electrons through a given piece of matter without blowing it up). Language and VM authors ignore the expectations of their target systems only at great peril.

Let's look at a few languages and where they fit.

Language Scorecard

Java is statically typed and types are of a fixed shape. This is the ideal situation mostly because of the type structure being predictable. Once encountered, a rose is just a rose. Given appropriate dynamic optimizations, there's no reason Java code can't compete with or surpass statically-typed and statically-compiled C/++, and in theory there's nothing preventing Java code from becoming optimal CPU instructions.

Dart is dynamically typed (or at least, types are optional and the VM doesn't care about them), but types are of a fixed shape. If programmers can tolerate fixed-shape types, Dart provides a very nice dynamic language that still can achieve the same optimizations as statically-typed Java or statically-compiled C/++.

Groovy is dynamically typed with some inference and optimization if you specify static types, but most (all?) types defined in Groovy are not guaranteed to be a fixed shape. As a result, even when specifying static types, guards must be inserted to check that those types' shapes have not changed. Groovy does, however, guarantee object shape is consistent over time, which avoids overhead from being able to reshape objects at runtime.

Ruby and JavaScript are dynamically typed and types and objects can change shape at runtime. This is a confluence of all the hardest-to-optimize language characteristics. In both cases, the best we can do is to attempt to predict common type and object shapes and insert guards for when we're wrong, but it's not possible to achieve the performance of a system with fully-predictable type and object shapes. Prove me wrong.

Now of course when I say it's not possible, I mean it's not possible for the general case. Specific cases of a known closed-world application can indeed be optimized as though the types and objects involved had static shapes. I do something along these lines in my RubyFlux compiler, which statically analyzes incoming Ruby code and assumes the methods it sees defined and the fields it sees accessed will be the only methods and fields it ever needs to worry about. But that requires omitting features that can mutate type and object structure, or else you have to have a way to know which types and objects those features will affect. Sufficiently smart compiler indeed.

Python has similar structural complexities to Ruby and adds in the additional complexity of an introspectable call stack. Under those circumstances, even on-stack execution state is not safe; a VM can't even make guarantees about the values it has in hand or the shape of a given call's activation. PyPy does an admirable job of attacking this problem by rewriting currently-running code and lifting on-stack state to the heap when it is accessed, but this approach prevents dropping unused local state (since you can't predict who might want to see it) and also fails to work under parallel execution (since you can't rewrite code another thread might be executing). Again, the dynamicity of a "cool" feature brings with it intrinsic penalties that are reducible but not removable.

Get to the Damn Point, Already

So what am I trying to say in all this? I started the evening by exploring a benchmark post comparing Dart's VM with JVM on the same benchmark. The numbers were not actually very exciting...with a line-by-line port from Dart to Java, Java came out slightly behind Dart. With a few modifications to the Java code, Java pulled slightly ahead. With additional modifications to the Dart code, it might leapfrog Java again. But this isn't interesting because Dart and Java can both rely on type and object shapes remaining consistent, and as a result the optimizations they perform can basically accomplish the same thing. Where it matters, they're similar enough that VMs don't care about the differences.

Where does this put languages I love, like Ruby? It's probably fair to concede that Ruby can't ever achieve the raw, straight-line performance of type-static (not statically-typed) languages like Dart or Java, regardless of the VM technologies involved. We'll be able to get close; JRuby can, with the help of invokedynamic, make method calls *nearly* as fast as Java calls, and by generating type shapes we can make object state *nearly* as predictable as Java types, but we can't go all the way. Regardless of how great the underlying VM is, if you can't hold to its immutable truths, you're walking against the wind. Ruby on Dart would probably not be any faster than Ruby on JVM, because you'd still have to implement mutable types and growable objects in pretty much the same way. Ruby on PyPy might be able to go farther, since the VM is designed for mutable types and growable objects, but you might have to sacrifice parallelism or accept that straight-line object-manipulating performance won't go all the way to a Java or Dart. Conversely, languages that make those type-static guarantees might be able to beat dynamic languages when running on dynamic language VMs (e.g. dart2js) for exactly the same reasons that they excel on their own VMs: they provide a more consistent view of the world, and offer no surprises to the VM that would hinder optimization. You trade dynamicity at the language level for predictability at the VM level.

The Actual Lesson

I guess the bottom line for me is realizing that there's always going to be a conflict between what programmers want out of programming languages and what's actually possible to give them. There's no magical fairy world where every language can be as fast as every other language, because there's no way to predict how every program is going to execute (or in truth, how a given program is going to execute given a general strategy). And that's ok; most of these languages can still get very close to each other in performance, and over time the dynamic type/object-shaped languages may offer ways to ratchet down some of that dynamism...or they might not care and just accept what limitations result. The important thing is for language users to recognize that nothing is free, and to understand the implications of language features and design decisions they make in their own programs.

Constant and Global Optimization in JRuby 1.7.1 and 1.7.2

With every JRuby release, there's always at least a handful of optimizations. They range from tiny improvements in the compiler to perf-aware rewrites of core class methods, but they're almost always driven by real-world cases.

In JRuby 1.7.1 and 1.7.2, I made several improvements to the performance of Ruby constants and global variables that might be of some interest to you, dear reader.

Constants

In Ruby, a constant is a lexically and hierarchically accessed variable that starts with a capital letter. Class and module names like Object, Kernel, String, are all constants defined under the Object class. When I say constants are both lexical and hierarchically accessed, what I mean is that at access time we first search outward through lexically-enclosing scopes, and failing that we search through the class hierarchy of the innermost scope. For example:

Here, the first two constant accesses inside class B are successful; the first (IN_FOO) is located lexically in Foo, because it encloses the body of class B. The second (IN_A) is located hierarchically by searching B's ancestors. The third access fails, because the IN_BAR constant is only available within the Bar module's scope, so B can't see it.

Constants also...aren't. It is possible to redefine a constant, or define new constants deeper in a lexical or hierarchical strcture that mask earlier ones. However in most code (i.e. "good" code) constants eventually stabilize. This makes it possible to perform a variety of optimizations against them, even though they're not necessarily static.

Constants are used heavily throughout Ruby, both for constant values like Float::MAX and for classes like Array or Hash. It is therefore especially important that they be as fast as possible.

Global Variables

Globals in Ruby are about like you'd expect...name/value pairs in a global namespace. They start with  $ character. Several global variables are "special" and exist in a more localized source, like $~ (last regular expression match in this call frame), $! (last exception raised in this thread), and so on. Use of these "local globals" mostly just amounts to special variable names that are always available; they're not really true global variables.

Everyone knows global variables should be discouraged, but that's largely referring to global variable use in normal program flow. Using global state across your application – potentially across threads – is a pretty nasty thing to do to yourself and your coworkers. But there are some valid uses of globals, like for logging state and levels, debugging flags, and truly global constructs like standard IO.

Here, we're using the global $DEBUG to specify whether logging should occur in MyApp#log. Those log messages are written to the stderr stream accessed via $stderr. Note also that $DEBUG can be set to true by passing -d at the JRuby command line.

Optimizing Constant Access (pre-1.7.1)

I've posted in the past about how JRuby optimizes constant access, so I'll just quickly review that here.

At a given access point, constant values are looked up from the current lexical scope and cached. Because constants can be modified, or new constants can be introduce that mask earlier ones, the JRuby runtime (org.jruby.Ruby) holds a global constant invalidator checked on each access to ensure the previous value is still valid.

On non-invokedynamic JVMs, verifying the cache involves an object identity comparison every time, which means a non-final value must be accessed via a couple levels of indirection. This adds a certain amount of overhead to constant access, and also makes it impossible for the JVM to fold multiple constant accesses away, or make static decisions based on a constant's value.

On an invokedynamic JVM, the cache verification is in the form of a SwitchPoint. SwitchPoint is a type of on/off guard used at invokedynamic call sites to represent a hard failure. Because it can only be switched off, the JVM is able to optimize the SwitchPoint logic down to what's called a "safe point", a very inexpensive ping back into the VM. As a result, constant accesses under invokedynamic can be folded away, and repeat access or unused accesses are not made at all.

However, there's a problem. In JRuby 1.7.0 and earlier, the only way we could access the current lexical scope (in a StaticScope object) was via the current call frame's DynamicScope, a heap-based object created on each activation of a given body of code. In order to reduce the performance hit to methods containing constants, we introduced a one-time DynamicScope called the "dummy scope", attached to the lexical scope and only created once. This avoided the huge hit of constructing a DynamicScope for every call, but caused constant-containing methods to be considerably slower than those without constants.

Lifting Lexical Scope Into Code

In JRuby 1.7.1, I decided to finally bite the bullet and make the lexical scope available to all method bodies, without requiring a DynamicScope intermediate. This was a nontrivial piece of work that took several days to get right, so although most of the work occurred before JRuby 1.7.0 was released, we opted to let it bake a bit before release.

The changes made it possible for all class, module, method, and block bodies to access their lexical scope essentially for free. It also helped us finally deliver on the promise of truly free constant access when running under invokedynamic.

So, does it work?

Assuming constant access is free, the three loops here should perform identically. The non-expression calls to foo and bar should disappear, since they both return a constant value that's never used. The calls for decrementing the 'a' variable should produce a constant value '1' and perform the same as the literal decrement in the control loop.

Here's Ruby (MRI) 2.0.0 performance on this benchmark.

The method call itself adds a significant amount of overhead here, and the constant access adds another 50% of that overhead. Ruby 2.0.0 has done a lot of work on performance, but the cost of invoking Ruby methods and accessing constants remains high, and constant accesses do not fold away as you would like.

Here's JRuby 1.7.2 performance on the same benchmark.

We obviously run all cases significantly faster than Ruby 2.0.0, but the important detail is that the method call adds only about 11% overhead to the control case, and constant access adds almost nothing.

For comparison, here's JRuby 1.7.0, which did not have free access to lexical scopes.

So by avoiding the intermediate DynamicScope, methods containing constant accesses are somewhere around 7x faster than before. Not bad.

Optimizing Global Variables

Because global variables have a much simpler structure than constants, they're pretty easy to optimize. I had not done so up to JRuby 1.7.1 mostly because I didn't see a compelling use case and didn't want to encourage their use. However, after Tony Arcieri pointed out that invokedynamic-optimized global variables could be used to add logging and profiling to an application with zero impact when disabled, I was convinced. Let's look at the example from above again.

In this example, we would ideally like there to be no overhead at all when $DEBUG is untrue, so we're free to add optional logging throughout the application with no penalty. In order to support this, two improvements were needed.

First, I modified our invokedynamic logic to cache global variables using a per-variable SwitchPoint. This makes access to mostly-static global variables as free as constant access, with the same performance improvements.

Second, I added some smarts into the compiler for conditional forms like "if $DEBUG" that would avoid re-checking the $DEBUG value at all if it were false the first time (and start checking it again if it were modified).

It's worth noting I also made this second optimization for constants; code like "if DEBUG_ENABLED" will also have the same performance characteristics.

Let's see how it performs.

In this case, we should again expect that all three forms have identical performance. Both the constant and the global resolve to an untrue value, so they should ideally not introduce any overhead compared to the bare method.

Here's Ruby (MRI) 2.0.0:

Both the global and the constant add overhead here in the neighborhood of 25% over an empty method. This means you can't freely add globally-conditional logic to your application without accepting a performance hit.

JRuby 1.7.2:

Again we see JRuby + invokedynamic optimizing method calls considerably better than MRI, but additionally we see that the untrue global conditions add no overhead compared to the empty method. You can freely use globals as conditions for logging, profiling, and other code you'd like to have disabled most of the time.

And finally, JRuby 1.7.1, which optimized constants, did not optimize globals, and did not have specialized conditional logic for either:

Where Do We Go From Here?

Hopefully I've helped show that we're really just seeing the tip of the iceberg as far as optimizing JRuby using invokedynamic. More than anything we want you to report real-world use cases that could benefit from additional optimization, so we can target our work effectively. And as always, please try out your apps on JRuby, enable JRuby testing in Travis CI, and let us know what we can do to make your JRuby experience better!