A better way to do thread renaming

[galder at redhat.com]

Hi Trustin,

While debugging a netty server that's being exercised in unit testing with a netty based client, I've discovered that having ThreadRenamingRunnable.threadNameDeterminer set as static can cause a lot of confusion cos you end up seeing client decoder threads and server decoder threads with the same thread name.

For example, in my logs I see things like this:

2010-04-30 12:39:27,993 1152  TRACE [org.infinispan.server.hotrod.HotRodEncoder$] (HotRodWorker-3-1:) Encode msg Response{messageId=8, operation=PutResponse, status=Success}
2010-04-30 12:39:27,995 1154  TRACE [org.infinispan.server.hotrod.test.Decoder] (HotRodWorker-3-1:) Decode response from server

The first line belongs to server code and the belongs to client code that's decoding server responses.

Now, you could think that this might be a problem in my name delimiter implementation and indeed that's the case:

infinispan.log:1552:2010-04-30 12:39:27,762 921   TRACE [org.infinispan.server.core.transport.netty.NettyTransport$] (pool-30-thread-1:) Thread name will be HotRodWorker-3-1, with current thread name being Thread[pool-30-thread-1,5,main] and proposed name being New I/O client worker #3-1
infinispan.log:1563:2010-04-30 12:39:27,755 914   TRACE [org.infinispan.server.core.transport.netty.NettyTransport$] (pool-15-thread-1:) Thread name will be HotRodWorker-3-1, with current thread name being Thread[pool-15-thread-1,5,main] and proposed name being New I/O server worker #3-1

I hadn't realised that you'd name client and server threads differently. Hence, I'm being forced now to see if the proposed name has client or server in it to decide the final name. All in all, it seems rather error prone for me to have to do things like this, particularly if in the future you change the internal format.

So, rather than having a method called determineThreadName(currentThreadName: String, proposedThreadName: String), I'd rather see something along these lines:

determineThreadName(currentThreadName: String, threadType: Type, proposedThreadId: String, proposedNamePrefix: String)

Type would be an enum of values: CLIENT_BOSS, CLIENT_WORKER, SERVER_BOSS, SERVER_WORKER

proposedThreadId would be "3-1"

proposedNamePrefix: "New I/O"

Thoughts?
--
Galder Zamarreño
Sr. Software Engineer
Infinispan, JBoss Cache