Detect Who Created a Thread (w. Eclipse)

Okay, I was able to solve (sort of) the problem on my own: I put a breakpoint into

Thread.start() 

and manually stepped through each invocation. This way I found out pretty quickly that Class.forName() initialized lot of static code which in return created these mysterious threads.

While I was able to solve my problem I still think the more general task still remains unaddressed.

I religiously name my threads (using Thread(Runnable, String), say), otherwise they end up with a generic and somewhat useless name. Dumping the threads will highlight what's running and (thus) what's created them. This doesn't solve 3rd party thread creation, I appreciate.

EDIT: The JavaSpecialist newsletter addressed this issue recently (Feb 2015) by using a security manager. See here for more details

MORE: A couple of details for using the JavaSpecialist technique: The SecurityManager API includes "checkAccess(newThreadBeingCreated)" that is called on the thread creator's thread. The new thread already has its "name" initialized. So in that method, you have access to both the thread creator's thread, and the new one, and can log / print etc. When I tried this the code being monitored started throwing access protection exceptions; I fixed that by calling it under a AccessController.doPriviledged(new PrivilegedAction() { ... } where the run() method called the code being monitored.

When debuging your Eclipse application, you can stop all thread by clicking org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main field in the debug view.

Then from there, for each thread you can see the stack trace and goes up to the thred run method.

Sometimes this can help and sometimes not.

As Brian said, it a good practice to name threads because it's the only way to easily identify "who created them"