[jboss-jira] [JBoss JIRA] (JGRP-2075) SYM/ASYM_ENCRYPT: don't use WeakHashMap for old ciphers

SYM/ASYM_ENCRYPT: don't use WeakHashMap for old ciphers ------------------------------------------------------- Key: JGRP-2075 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2075 Project: JGroups Issue Type: Task Reporter: Bela Ban Assignee: Bela Ban Priority: Minor Fix For: 3.6.11, 4.0 Currently we use WeakHashMap, but should not, reasons outlined below. We could replace it with a LazyRemovalCache. Andrew's email refers to SecretKeys but this probably also applies to Ciphers. Andrew Haley's email: {quote} TL/DR: Please don't use WeakReferences, SoftReferences, etc. to cache any data which might point to native memory. In particular, never do this with instances of java.security.Key. Instead, implement either some kind of ageing strategy or a fixed-size cache. ... This is a warning to anybody who might cache crypto keys. A customer has been having problems with the exhaustion of native memory before the Java heap is full. It was fun trying to track down the cause, but it's now happened several times to several customers, and it's a serious problem for real-world usage in app servers. PKCS#11 is a standard way to communicate between applications and crypto libraries. There is a Java crypto provider which supports PKCS#11. Some of our customers must use this provider in order to get FIPS certification. The problem is this: A crypto key is a buffer in memory, allocated by the PKCS#11 native library. It's accessed via a handle which is stored as an integer field in a Java object. This Java object is a PhantomReference, so when the garbage collector detects that a crypto key is no longer reachable it is closed and the associated native memory is freed. Modern garbage collectors don't much bother to process objects in the old generation because it's not usually worthwhile. Thus, crypto keys don't get recycled very quickly. They can pile up in the old generation. This isn't a problem for the Java heap because the objects containing the references to crypto keys are very small. Unfortunately, the native side of a crypto key is much bigger, maybe up to a thousand times bigger. So if we have 4000 stale crypto keys in the heap that's not a problem, a few kbytes. But the native memory may be a megabyte. This problem is made even worse by Tomcat because it uses SoftReferences to cache crypto keys. SoftReferences are processed lazily, and maybe not at all until the Java heap runs out of memory. Unfortunately it doesn't, but the machine runs out of native memory instead. We could solve this simply by making instances of PKCS#11 keys really big Java objects by padding with dummy fields. Then, the GC would collect them quickly. This does work but it seriously impacts performance. Also, we could tweak the garbage collectors to clear out stale references more enthusiastically, but this impacts performance even more. There are some controls with the G1 collector which process SoftReferences more aggressively and these help, but again at the cost of performance. Finally: the Shanandoah collector we're working on handles this problem much better than the older collectors, but it's some way off. {quote}