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JProfiler joins YourKit, NetBeans and JHat in being able to read the hprof memory snapshot format. Why the increase in support for what is, after all, Sun's proprietary heap dump format? I suspect it may be response to user's requests because of the consistent reliability of being able to produce those dumps with the -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError option.

We've moved to having that as a standard option for our Sun JVM processes - in production as well as in development and testing. There is no apparent overhead (as long as you want the heap dumped when you get that OutOfMemoryError), and the heap dump has worked for us consistently. In fact for very large JVMs on Windows, it's the only way we can now consistently force a heap dump if we want one (we detailed the problems we've had with memory profiling large JVMs on Windows here if you are interested). I expect to see the hprof heap dump format increasingly supported by profilers.

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Of course, with such usefulness will eventually come standardization, and I notice there is a java.net project to specify an open binary heap dump format heap-snapshot - wouldn't that be nice, if the JVM heap dumps had a standard format across vendors.

Now on with the rest of our newsletter. Of course we have our usual news, article links, tools, and extracted tips. Over at fasterj.com, we have Kirk interviewing Ron Bodkin of Glassbox and they talk about some interesting Java performance issues; Javva the Hutt continues to tell us all about how he got his new job; and, of course we have extracted all the tips from those articles.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• JProfiler 5 released, adds hprof and additional trace options
• Klocwork static analysis tool includes support to detect Java concurrency issues.
• jKool Performance Monitor 1.5 Released
• IBM Releases MapReduce Tools - A new IBM alphaWorks tool makes it easier to work with the popular distributed computing technique MapReduce and the open-source Apache MapReduce implementation, Hadoop.

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Pervasive DataRush Java framework for developing applications on multicore hardware without the need for any knowledge of concurrent programming techniques.
• Hadoop: framework for running applications on large clusters of commodity hardware

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Articles

• Interviewing Ron Bodkin (Kirk Pepperdine/fasterj.com)
• Java grid computing (Corey Klaasmeyer/JavaWorld)
• Preventing Screen Lockups of Blocking Operations in MIDlets (Qusay H. Mahmoud/Sun)
• A performance-based approach to sizing infrastructure (George Dolbier/IBM)
• The Right Stuff (Rex Black & Barton Layne/Better Software Magazine)
• Five Ajax anti-patterns (Jack D Herrington/IBM)
• Controlling Threads by Example (Viraj Shetty/OnJava)

Jack Shirazi

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