Tracking Java thread creation and lifetime

Question

Are there any tools available to track the creation and lifetime of Java threads? I would be interested in all of the following:

• The call stack which called new Thread()
• The call stack which called start()
• The lifetime of the run() method

Answer 1

I have written and published an open source tool to answer this question.

Java Live Thread Analyser

I have blogged about the tool here.

Answer 2

I don't know of any framework like this. You certainly could subclass the Thread class and store this information on your own like the following. This however will not track Threads that are allocated in other classes such as Executors, etc..

  public class MyThread extends Thread {
      StackTraceElement[] constructorTrace;
      StackTraceElement[] startTrace;
      long runStartTimeMillis;
      long runFinishTimeMillis;

      // you'll need to duplicate the constructors you need
      public MyThread() {
         super();
         constructorTrace = Thread.currentThread().getStacktrace();
      }

      @Override
      public void start() {
         super.start();
         startTrace = Thread.currentThread().getStacktrace();
      }

      @Override
      public void run() {
         runStartTimeMillis = System.currentTimeMillis();
         super.run();
         runFinishTimeMillis = System.currentTimeMillis();
      }
  }