This plugin provides APIs that are used by core Pipeline plugins for features such as persistence and step visualization.
See the changelog.
Some consumers of this plugin improve readability of JVM thread dumps by using the org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.support.concurrent.WithThreadName feature to temporarily clarify the purpose of that thread.
This ends up calling Thread.setName() => JVM_SetNativeThreadName() => some native OS implementation (via pthreads or otherwise), both to enter and exit a context with this feature.
In some use-cases, e.g. with a generated parallel pipeline with hundreds of stages then waiting in a Jenkins queue for considerable time, this can amount to tens of thousands of native (not very efficient on some systems) calls per second just for this troubleshooting aid, and can cause considerable slow-down of the Jenkins controller.
If you suspect your controller's performance is impacted by this, please configure a JVM property or context setting org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.support.concurrent.WithThreadName.enabled=false to disable the feature's native calls.
You can still trace attempts to rename the threads by adding a Jenkins log listener for the class name at FINE or louder level, and watching the log entry stream via Web UI or automatically-rotating files on the controller.