Re: NPE in PriorityQueue.poll()

From:
Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:22:58 GMT
Message-ID:
<S717h.7412$L6.2285@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net>
Twisted wrote:

This is a strange one. App just recovered gracefully from:

java.lang.NullPointerException
    at java.util.PriorityQueue.siftDownComparable(PriorityQueue.java:627)
    at java.util.PriorityQueue.siftDown(PriorityQueue.java:614)
    at java.util.PriorityQueue.poll(PriorityQueue.java:523)
    at com.sourceforge.sphaera.SThread.run(SThread.java:158)

The line of my own code that's involved is basically

Foo bar = baz.poll();

with baz an instance of PriorityQueue<Foo> and definitely not itself
null (and besides, the stack trace would have consisted of only the
last line if it were).

Looks like a library bug. JDK 1.6.0 -server -incgc -Xmx256 under WinXP
in case it matters, with the 1.6.0 standard library (including
PriorityQueue implementation).


The failure appears to be in reorganizing code that would be very
vulnerable to synchronization problems.

I assume the PriorityQueue is either only used in a single thread, or is
supposed to be protected from simultaneous access by your own
synchronization.

However, it might still be worth replacing it with a
PriorityBlockingQueue, and verifying that the NPE still happens.

Patricia

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