Good questions, I'll answer what I can...
> 1) what is the problem that this is trying to solve, I assume from the
> subject that it is some sort of high memory usage?
Yes it involves memory usage and a memory leak. Basically, the way the code
was before the patch, each instantiation of a PreparedStatement created 2
new ThreadLocal objects. According to Sun's Javadocs, these objects are not
freed until the thread is completed. For a single thread app or main thread
of an application (in our case a server) the thread NEVER goes away.
Therefore these ThreadLocal objects just keep adding up and using memory,
forever.
The patch removes the use of these ThreadLocals.
> 2) I am trying to understand how a statement would ever be used
> by more than
> one thread at a time? I would think that it would be impossible to share
> statements across threads.
This I can't really answer. The code appeared to be written to be thread
safe so I attempted to continue that. Whether thread safe for a Statement is
necessary or not I can't directly say. Although, I agree with you, I can't
imagine a need to use a single Statement in multiple threads.
> 3) The double locking method used is alledgedly unsafe on SMP machines
> http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-02-2001/jw-0209-double_p.html.
Interesting. I wasn't aware of this. If question #2 is answered such that
thread safe isn't necessary, then this problem goes away pretty easily. If
thread safety is needed then this would have to be rewritten, I can look
into doing this if you like.
> Dave
--Rainer