2009 JavaOne: VisualVM

Sky-Tiger

ntelliJ IDEA Memory Profiler View

The CPU profiling shows where the majority of time was spent in execution. There's a big difference in the methods  that the IDEs spend there time on here

    * NetBeans spends most time on org.openide.util.RequestProcessor$Processor.run() - 58.1%
    * Eclipse spends it's time on java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke() - 45.5%
    * IntelliJ uses java.net.SocketInputStream.read() 38.7% of the time

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IDE Integration

Java developers are spoilt for choice when it comes to IDE's. It can be uncomfortable to step out of them to do any programming tasks - we've gotten used to it. Thankfully, there are plugin's available for all the popular IDEs, so you can work with VisualVM from the comfort of your favourite development environment, ignoring the command line.

NetBeans integration is an interesting topic when it comes to VisualVM. VisualVM is actually the profiler that comes as part of NetBeans by default. In it's standalone format, it is a NetBeans RCP application, which can be further extended with other Netbeans modules.

Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA integration is available here. MyEclipse 7.5 also comes bundled with VisualVM plugins. As an Eclipse developer, I was interested to see how this would work out - after all the tool is based on the NetBeans platform.

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Eclipse Integration

First you'll need to download the VisualVM Launcher plugin, and extract it to you Eclipse home directory. When you open the Run Configurations dialog, you will get a choice of application launchers. The default launcher to use can be changed in the Preferences page depending on what you're running.

In my own setup I have chosen to use the VisualVM Launcher for Debug and the standard Eclipse Application Launcher otherwise. You can change these settings for applications, applets or Eclipse applications.

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Extending VisualVM

If all the features listed above aren't enough for your own requirements, you can roll your own VisualVM plugins. There are a number of API entry points available, as illustrated in the diagram below.

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The main entry points available are:

    * Tab extension. By default, VisualVM provides tabs with labels such as "Overview", "Monitor", and "Threads". You can create new tabs just like these. Optionally, your own tabs can be extendable so that others can plug subtabs into your tabs. Your tabs can either be available for all data sources in VisualVM or to specific types of data sources.
    * Subtab extension. Within tabs such as those listed above, you can provide new subtabs. However, this is only possible if the tab has been defined to be "pluggable", which is explained below. The following tabs are all pluggable: "Overview", "Monitor", "Threads", "Heap Dump", and "Host". When you create a new subtab, you can specify its position in relation to the other subtabs within the tab. Subtabs can either be available for all data sources or for specific data sources.
    * Menu extension. A data source, and its subnodes, can have one or more menu items added to their contextual menus.
    * Application type extension. By default, all applications visualized in VisualVM are treated equally, that is, they all have the same icons and tabs, except if a plugin is provided to provide additional functionality. You might also want to provide functionality for a specific application, which means that you would need to define a new application type. You can do this to do something as simple as provide a distinguishing icon for a running instance of your application. Alternatively, you might want to provide a lot of functionality, including graphs, to show the processing of your specific application.
    * Data source extension. The "Application" data source is only one of the types of data sources that can be monitored and managed in VisualVM. Another of the data sources is the "Host" data source, which lets you monitor and manage local and remote hosts. You might want to create new data sources, in situations where you want to monitor and manage a type of data source that VisualVM does not cater for by default.

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There's a detailed page on the VisualVM site showing you how to create your own plugins for VisualVM.  It seems pretty straightforward, especially if you are familiar with the plugin development approaches in NetBeans or Eclipse.  And there are quite a few plugins available already through the VisualVM Plugins Center. To see these go to Tools/Plugins.

Considering how easy it is to get VisualVM (you have it already), and the extensible platform that it's built on, surely this will become one of those tools that you can't do without. I'm impressed with the way that it just picks up the applications that are running, instead of having to register with the profiler. In theory, you could have it running in the background all the time, while you perfect and relaunch your Java application.

It's something that you probably haven't taken much notice of before, but it's well worth taking it for a run and seeing if it helps you spot any weak performance areas in your application.

Sky-Tiger

Java VisualVM is a tool that provides a visual interface for viewing detailed information about Java applications while they are running on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and for troubleshooting and profiling these applications. Various optional tools, including Java VisualVM, are provided with Sun's distribution of the Java Development Kit (JDK) for retrieving different types of data about running JVM software instances. For example, most of the previously standalone tools JConsole, jstat, jinfo, jstack, and jmap are part of Java VisualVM. Java VisualVM federates these tools to obtain data from the JVM software, then re-organizes and presents the information graphically, to enable you to view different data about multiple Java applications uniformly, whether they are running locally or on remote machines. Furthermore, developers can extend Java VisualVM to add new functionality by creating and posting plug-ins to the tool's built-in update center.

    Java VisualVM can be used by Java application developers to troubleshoot applications and to monitor and improve the applications' performance. Java VisualVM can allow developers to generate and analyse heap dumps, track down memory leaks, browse the platform's MBeans and perform operations on those MBeans, perform and monitor garbage collection, and perform lightweight memory and CPU profiling.

    Java VisualVM was first bundled with the the Java platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) in JDK version 6, update 7.

justforregister

nice job

Sky-Tiger

原帖由 justforregister 于 2009-7-7 22:50 发表
nice job

justforregister

原帖由 Sky-Tiger 于 2009-7-7 23:15 发表