Profile data from the JMol application shows the AWT event thread starting and stopping several times during startup. This could be affecting startup time. Here are some comments from "Danila A. Sinopalnikov".

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I looked at JMol and investigated this issue.

AWT auto-shutdown behavior is based on the following rules:

1.A new blocking thread is created if currently there is no blocking
  thread and one of the following happens:
    (1)The AWT Toolkit is initialized.
    (2)An AWT component peer is created.
    (3)A native event occurs on the native event queue.
    (4)A java event occurs on a java event queue.

2.A new event dispatch thread is started whenever there is no event
  dispatch thread currently associated with an AWT event queue and an
  event appears on the queue.

3.The existing blocking thread terminates all event dispatch threads and
  exits whenever all three conditions are true:
    (5)There are no non-disposed peers.
    (6)There are no events in the native event queue.
    (7)There are no events in java event queues.

I run JMol on Solaris 2.8 with merlin b73:
 % java -server -Xint -Xprof -cp jmol-0.2/jars/jmol.jar -Djmol.home=jmol-0.2 jmol.Jmol

AWT-Shutdown starts up and shuts down 16 times during Jmol startup.
Each time one of (1)-(4) occurs and after some delay (5)-(7) become true.
The start reasons are:
(1) - once
(2) - once
(3) - once
(4) - 13 times

AWT-EventQueue-0 starts up and shuts down 13 times during Jmol startup:
1.A java event is posted to an AWT event queue (12 times)
2.A native event occurs on the native event queue (once)

I attached corresponding stack traces at the end of the email.

Every startup and shutdown is performed according to the rules 1-3.
During development of AWT auto shutdown the issue of numerous startups
of blocking threads was taken into account.
The following solution was to resolve it: termination is initiated
only when (5)-(7) remain true for a certain timeout (set to 1000ms).
So in any case a blocking thread should live for at least 1000ms.

However, this doesn't work as can be seen from AWT-Shutdown threads
life time in the Xprof output for Jmol startup attached to your
original email.

I debugged the code and verified that termination starts even if
(5)-(7) remain true for less than 10ms.

The behavior doesn't change if the value of the timeout is increased,
say up to 10000ms.

The investigation shows that Object.wait(long delay) wakes up
before the delay elapsed even without the Object being notify()'ed.

I applied the following diffs to AWTAutoShutdown:
--- AWTAutoShutdown.java Thu Aug 2 13:16:29 2001
***************
*** 278,284 ****
                              break;
                          }
                          timeoutPassed = true;
! mainLock.wait(SAFETY_TIMEOUT);
                      }
                  }
              } catch (InterruptedException e) {
--- 278,289 ----
                              break;
                          }
                          timeoutPassed = true;
! final long timeout =
! System.currentTimeMillis() + SAFETY_TIMEOUT;
! while (timeoutPassed &&
! (System.currentTimeMillis() < timeout)) {
! mainLock.wait(SAFETY_TIMEOUT);
! }

If Object.wait(long delay) works as specified by javadoc,
this change is equivalent, since 'timeoutPassed' is set to 'false'
whenever the 'mainLock' is notified. However, this change noticeably
affects the behavior: AWT-Shutdown starts up only 3 times and
AWT-EventQueue-0 starts up only twice. I was unable to reproduce the
described incorrect behavior of Object.wait(long delay) with a simple
test case and i cannot dig into Object.wait(long delay), since
Hotspot VM sources are unavailable.

Probably, we should ask Hotspot team to look into this.
If if is impossible, the diffs listed above can be used as a temporary
workaround.
What do you think?

Thanks,
Danila.
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