Reports on while loops which spin on the value of a non-volatile field, waiting for it to be changed by another thread.

In addition to being potentially extremely CPU intensive when little work is done inside the loop, such loops likely have different semantics than intended. The Java Memory Model allows that loop to never complete even if another thread changes the field's value.

Example:


  class SpinsOnField {
      boolean ready = false;

      void run() {
          // the loop may never complete even after
          // markAsReady call from the other thread
          while (!ready) {
          }
          // do some work
      }

      void markAsReady() {
          ready = true;
      }
  }

Additionally since Java 9 it's recommended to call Thread.onSpinWait() inside spin loop on a volatile field which may significantly improve performance on some hardware.

Use the checkbox below to have this inspection report only about empty while loops.