TS-6000 : Improving Application Performance with Monitoring and Profiling Tools

Last year I made a change that I really enjoyed: I did not blog during JavaOne. The event alone is enough of an exercise in endurance, so I decided to drop the blogging in favor of additional sleep. :-)

I did a technical session this year with Jaroslav Bachorík (who sometimes blogs here). Our goal was to do an overview of some of the tools available for tracking down performance and memory problems in Java applications. So the talk was broad, not deep - we covered 12 different tools and did demos of 3 of those.

It seemed to be well received, based on initial reviews. The room holds about 800 and was packed, so we did the session a second time late on Friday afternoon (not as large a crowd the second time, of course).

The slides are available here. There are several links to online resources, which I have reproduced below.

• Java SE Performance White Paper - a great starting point.


• Troubleshooting Guide for Java SE 6 with HotSpot VM - provides useful tips


• DTrace portal - contains links to several resources


• An article on using DTrace with Java applications, by Jarod Jenson.


• An article on using the Sun Studio Collector/Analyzer on Java applications, by Marty Itzkowitz.


• An interesting article by Nasser Nouri on using DTrace in conjunction with the Sun Studio Collector/Analyzer.


• The project page for BTrace.


• The project page for GChisto.


• Part 1 and part 2 of an article I wrote with Sundar and Frank Kieviet on dealing with different types of memory leaks in Java applications.


• Features in the NetBeans profiling tools, and the project page.


• The Hands On Lab on the NetBeans profiling tools that I taught with Maria Davydova is now available for download here.


• The project page for VisualVM.