Understanding Thread Creation Activity

You can get an idea of how often your application creates and destroys threads by using the thr_create event and thr_exit event as in the following example:

(dbx) trace thr_create
(dbx) trace thr_exit
(dbx) run

trace: thread created t@2 on l@2
trace: thread created t@3 on l@3
trace: thread created t@4 on l@4
trace: thr_exit t@4
trace: thr_exit t@3
trace: thr_exit t@2

The application created three threads. Note how the threads exited in reverse order from their creation, which might indicate that had the application had more threads, the threads would accumulate and consume resources.

To get more interesting information, you could try the following in a different session:

(dbx) when thr_create { echo "XXX thread $newthread created by $thread"; }
XXX thread t@2 created by t@1
XXX thread t@3 created by t@1
XXX thread t@4 created by t@1

The output shows that all three threads were created by thread t@1, which is a common multi-threading pattern.

Suppose you want to debug thread t@3 from its outset. You could stop the application at the point that thread t@3 is created as follows:

(dbx) stop thr_create t@3
(dbx) run
t@1 (l@1) stopped in tdb_event_create at 0xff38409c
0xff38409c: tdb_event_create       :    retl
Current function is main
216       stat = (int) thr_create(NULL, 0, consumer, q, tflags, &tid_cons2);
(dbx)

If your application occasionally spawns a new thread from thread t@5 instead of thread t@1, you could capture that event as follows:

(dbx) stop thr_create -thread t@5