Sunday 19 June 2016

Java power tools series - Performance Analysis

I hope, you have already read "Preface" of my java power tools series. Actually, I was intending to write detailed separate posts on numerous performance diagnostic tools, like I wrote few posts previously as part of this series. Anyway, let me start with quickly recollecting my knowledge on this topic.

Well, performance analysis and optimization is indeed not a child's play. At times, it may be a hard nut to crack for developers, specifically when performance problem is reported by a client in production environment and not replicated in testing or development. In fact, scalability issue is reported as performance issue sometimes, which can be solved by vertical or horizontal scalability instead of unnecessarily spending time in code analysis and optimization activity. Likewise, always performance issue could not be triggered by faulty code, rather there could be inefficient application server or JVM tuning issue! You never know. Therefore, there has to be a thoughtful architectural strategy to accomplish application's performance requirements or for troubleshooting and fixing reported performance problems. Well, Performance Engineering, Benchmarking, Software Performance Testing, Performance Tuning and Java Performance are vast topics by own. So, let me restrict this blog primarily for listing java application performance monitoring, profiling and analysis tools.

Few remarkable tools for performance analysis of Java applications


Problem Statements
My Preferred Tool / Product / Solution
Pricing Remark
Related References
I am damn sure, there are memory related issues. Just need to find memory leaks and reduce memory consumption via memory dump analysis.
Free
 
Just need to analyze java thread dumps.
Free
For non-production environment, need visual interface for Java monitoring and troubleshooting tool, which should provide some basic profiling capabilities too. (may use in production, if performance overhead is not a critical concern!)
Free
Looking for modular and extensible web console, which can be used to manage every kind of container or even any JVM middleware.
Free
For production environment or complex performance troubleshooting needs in non-production environments, need advance Java Profiling tool. Needless to mention, such tool's performance overhead should be minimal or even controllable.
Commercial

(Oracle JMC and JFR requires to purchase license for production use, otherwise it's Free.)
Need of APM solution for Business transactions profiling, root cause detection and performance diagnosis in Development or Test Environment for single JVM or an application. Just limited freely offered "Java performance monitoring with automatic root cause detection" features may be sufficient to find a performance bottleneck. (may use in production for simplistic requirement)
Free

(limited features available compare to commercial offerings)
* All in All, looking for adopting full-fledge Application Performance Management (APM) solution for production, and apparently should work for distributed systems by providing a visual dashboard to manage multiple JVMs across different machines.
* The performance issue is reported in production, but not able to replicate in Development and QA environments, so all are at their wit's end to find the bottleneck in the system! Need to troubleshoot problem directly in production with negligible overhead!
* Java profiling tool is not sufficient for performance analysis. Because performance issues are occurring unexpectedly in production systems and exact business transaction or bottleneck is unknown, which is causing the issues! It could be even Database or external Web Service or Scala component!
Pressing business requirement to discover, diagnostic and resolve application issues before they impact end users, violate SLA or negatively impact the business.
* Need a complete solution to monitor various components of the application and technology stack, such as server, database, hardware, network. In fact, looking for an automated capability in production to identify problematic transactions based on performance thresholds and offer centralized business intelligence like dashboard.
Commercial

(for real production purpose, all are commercial. Most offers SaaS pricing model. Although, some offers On-Premise and Hybrid deployment options too)

The Performance Tuning Lifecycle


If you are newbie to Java performance tuning area, then I strongly suggest to attend less than 2 hours Complete Java Performance Tuning Training course on youtube for fundamental understanding on the following performance tuning lifecycle. Then, you can proceed to choose suitable tools to identify performance bottleneck.
  1. Define Requirements
  2. Measure / Test (Create Baseline)
  3. Identify Bottleneck
  4. Implement Fixes
  5. Measure / Test (New Baseline)
  6. Compare to Old Baseline & Requirements
  7. If necessary repeat steps 3 – 6

Performance Troubleshooting Tools Highlights


You may attend an hour presentation on "Troubleshooting Live Java Web Applications", which I found very informative for the performance troubleshooting tools scoping in production vs. development environment. Specifically at the end of the presentation below final tools comparison chart provides outstanding information.


Also Refer


Disclaimer

I am not biased to particular free or commercial tools, rather my objective is about sharing my own candid experience on set of tools.


If you know or have experienced any other tools suitable for Java applications performance analysis, please share the name of such tool along with your personal feedback in the comment.
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