kotlinx-coroutines-debug

Debugging facilities for kotlinx.coroutines on JVM.

Overview

This module provides a debug JVM agent that allows to track and trace existing coroutines. The main entry point to debug facilities is DebugProbes API. Call to DebugProbes.install installs debug agent via ByteBuddy and starts spying on coroutines when they are created, suspended and resumed.

After that, you can use DebugProbes.dumpCoroutines to print all active (suspended or running) coroutines, including their state, creation and suspension stacktraces. Additionally, it is possible to process the list of such coroutines via DebugProbes.dumpCoroutinesInfo or dump isolated parts of coroutines hierarchy referenced by a Job or CoroutineScope instances using DebugProbes.printJob and DebugProbes.printScope respectively.

This module also provides an automatic BlockHound integration that detects when a blocking operation was called in a coroutine context that prohibits it. In order to use it, please follow the BlockHound quick start guide.

Using in your project

Add kotlinx-coroutines-debug to your project test dependencies:

dependencies {
    testImplementation 'org.jetbrains.kotlinx:kotlinx-coroutines-debug:1.4.0'
}

Using in unit tests

For JUnit4 debug module provides special test rule, CoroutinesTimeout, for installing debug probes and to dump coroutines on timeout to simplify tests debugging.

Its usage is better demonstrated by the example (runnable code is test/TestRuleExample.kt):

class TestRuleExample {
    @get:Rule
    public val timeout = CoroutinesTimeout.seconds(1)

    private suspend fun someFunctionDeepInTheStack() {
        withContext(Dispatchers.IO) {
            delay(Long.MAX_VALUE) // Hang method
        }  
    }

    @Test
    fun hangingTest() = runBlocking {
        val job = launch {
            someFunctionDeepInTheStack()
        }
        job.join() // Join will hang
    }
}

After 1 second, test will fail with TestTimeoutException and all coroutines (runBlocking and launch) and their stacktraces will be dumped to the console.

Using as JVM agent

Debug module can also be used as a standalone JVM agent to enable debug probes on the application startup. You can run your application with an additional argument: -javaagent:kotlinx-coroutines-debug-1.9.0.jar. Additionally, on Linux and Mac OS X you can use kill -5 $pid command in order to force your application to print all alive coroutines. When used as Java agent, "kotlinx.coroutines.debug.enable.creation.stack.trace" system property can be used to control DebugProbes.enableCreationStackTraces along with agent startup.

Using in production environment

It is possible to run an application in production environments with debug probes in order to monitor its state and improve its observability. For that, it is strongly recommended not to enable DebugProbes.enableCreationStackTraces, as enabling it makes the performance overhead of the debug probes non-negligible. With creation stack-traces disabled, the typical overhead of enabled debug probes is a single-digit percentage of the total application throughput.

Example of usage

Capabilities of this module can be demonstrated by the following example (runnable code is test/Example.kt):

suspend fun computeValue(): String = coroutineScope {
    val one = async { computeOne() }
    val two = async { computeTwo() }
    combineResults(one, two)
}

suspend fun combineResults(one: Deferred<String>, two: Deferred<String>): String =
    one.await() + two.await()

suspend fun computeOne(): String {
    delay(5000)
    return "4"
}

suspend fun computeTwo(): String {
    delay(5000)
    return "2"
}

fun main() = runBlocking {
    DebugProbes.install()
    val deferred = async { computeValue() }
    // Delay for some time
    delay(1000)
    // Dump running coroutines
    DebugProbes.dumpCoroutines()
    println("\nDumping only deferred")
    DebugProbes.printJob(deferred)
}

Printed result will be:

Coroutines dump 2018/11/12 21:44:02

Coroutine "coroutine#2":DeferredCoroutine{Active}@289d1c02, state: SUSPENDED
	at kotlinx.coroutines.DeferredCoroutine.await$suspendImpl(Builders.common.kt:99)
	at ExampleKt.combineResults(Example.kt:11)
	at ExampleKt$computeValue$2.invokeSuspend(Example.kt:7)
	at ExampleKt$main$1$deferred$1.invokeSuspend(Example.kt:25)

... More coroutines here ...

Dumping only deferred
"coroutine#2":DeferredCoroutine{Active}, continuation is SUSPENDED at line kotlinx.coroutines.DeferredCoroutine.await$suspendImpl(Builders.common.kt:99)
    "coroutine#3":DeferredCoroutine{Active}, continuation is SUSPENDED at line ExampleKt.computeOne(Example.kt:14)
    "coroutine#4":DeferredCoroutine{Active}, continuation is SUSPENDED at line ExampleKt.computeTwo(Example.kt:19)

Status of the API

API is experimental, and it is not guaranteed it won't be changed (while it is marked as @ExperimentalCoroutinesApi). Like the rest of experimental API, DebugProbes is carefully designed, tested and ready to use in both test and production environments. It is marked as experimental to leave us the room to enrich the output data in a potentially backwards incompatible manner to further improve diagnostics and debugging experience.

The output format of DebugProbes can be changed in the future and it is not recommended to rely on the string representation of the dump programmatically.

Debug agent and Android

Android runtime does not support Instrument API necessary for kotlinx-coroutines-debug to function, triggering java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Failed resolution of: Ljava/lang/management/ManagementFactory;, and it is not possible to use coroutine debugger along with Android emulator.

Build failures due to duplicate resource files

Building an Android project that depends on kotlinx-coroutines-debug (usually introduced by being a transitive dependency of kotlinx-coroutines-test) may fail with DuplicateRelativeFileException for META-INF/AL2.0, META-INF/LGPL2.1, or win32-x86/attach_hotspot_windows.dll when trying to merge the Android resource.

The problem is that Android merges the resources of all its dependencies into a single directory and complains about conflicts, but:

• kotlinx-coroutines-debug transitively depends on JNA and JNA-platform, both of which include license files in their META-INF directories. Trying to merge these files leads to conflicts, which means that any Android project that depends on JNA and JNA-platform will experience build failures.

• Additionally, kotlinx-coroutines-debug embeds byte-buddy-agent and byte-buddy, along with their resource files. Then, if the project separately depends on byte-buddy, merging the resources of kotlinx-coroutines-debug with ones from byte-buddy and byte-buddy-agent will lead to conflicts as the resource files are duplicated.

One possible workaround for these issues is to add the following to the android block in your gradle file for the application subproject:

     packagingOptions {
         // for JNA and JNA-platform
         exclude "META-INF/AL2.0"
         exclude "META-INF/LGPL2.1"
         // for byte-buddy
         exclude "META-INF/licenses/ASM"
         pickFirst "win32-x86-64/attach_hotspot_windows.dll"
         pickFirst "win32-x86/attach_hotspot_windows.dll"
     }

This will cause the resource merge algorithm to exclude the problematic license files altogether and only leave a single copy of the files needed for byte-buddy-agent to work.

Alternatively, avoid depending on kotlinx-coroutines-debug. In particular, if the only reason why this library a dependency of your project is that kotlinx-coroutines-test in turn depends on it, you may change your dependency on kotlinx.coroutines.test to exclude kotlinx-coroutines-debug. For example, you could replace

androidTestImplementation("org.jetbrains.kotlinx:kotlinx-coroutines-test:$coroutines_version")

with

androidTestImplementation("org.jetbrains.kotlinx:kotlinx-coroutines-test:$coroutines_version") {
    exclude group: "org.jetbrains.kotlinx", module: "kotlinx-coroutines-debug"
}