Tips and Tricks – Quest JProbe Profiler

1. Tips and Tricks – Quest JProbe Profiler

2. Goals of our Session • Review the features of JProbe and how industry leading companies leverage them • Allow you an opportunity to ask questions regarding Quest JProbe Profiler • Help improve your productivity

3. Profilers • Allow you to measure time associated with the execution of specific code paths • Profilers are not benchmark tools – the time is relative to other method calls • Identify expensive methods • Measure the improvement your changes have made You need to: • Determine use cases to test • When and how you plan to use a profiler

4. JProbe The market-leading Performance tuning toolkit for Java application code. Includes: • JProbe Profiler • JProbe Memory Debugger • JProbe Threadalyzer • JProbe Coverage

5. Tip 1: When and Where to Profile • After memory leaks have been found and removed (Use Quest JProbe Memory Debugger) • At set milestones in your project • As you develop code, and also on the target deployment operating system • You must have performance goals to measure against

6. Tip 2: Remote Profiling • Do you want to profile an application on a remote server? • Use JProbe’s remote profiling capabilities instead of terminal emulation software – better performance and stability and no extra cost. • Do you have NFS or Samba?

7. Tip 3: The Power of Filters • By limiting the data shown, you are focused on key issues much more quickly • Always start investigation at a method level and then perform line level on expensive method • Filter order is important – watch out for red lines • Filter settings affect the speed at which JProbe Profiler runs

8. Tip 4: Reducing time required to Profile • Set up filters to focus only on your code of interest – encapsulate trusted methods • Start with Method level for first investigation, then line level on only suspect methods • Tracking Object Allocation can be expensive, only select it when you need to investigate • J2EE Tip: start profiling after your J2EE container has started up

9. Tip 5: Settings for Success • How do you want to test: local, remote, overnight? • Filters are key – get them right • Triggers can allow for automation of collection process

10. Tip 6: The Value of the Heap Graph in JProbe Profiler • Determine if initial heap size is a performance drain • Identify possible memory leak situations or object cycling situations – if found, use Memory Debugger to analyze and remove these situations

11. Tip 7: What to do When Your Code is Not the Issue • If GUI related, maybe add code to inform the user that things are actually happening (ex. Progress bars) • Can you use an alternative call, substitute another algorithm or component. Maybe reduce the frequency of calls to a method? • Are you using the framework correctly?

12. Tip 8: Proving how Good You are! • Snapshot differencing allows you to compare the snapshot before and after your code changes. • Generate a report to prove to management that the changes you made had a net positive impact on Use Case in question. • In fact, you could use snapshot difference to measure performance impact of code changes throughout the project lifecycle – create a baseline report

13. Tip 9: Automating the Collection Process • Triggers are a powerful and underused capability. • Triggers can be initiated based on entry and exit of methods. You can automate the start of collection of data, generation of a snapshot file and clearing of the data already collected. • They can be used along with interactive profiling sessions to just start collecting data when you enter your code (ex. J2EE projects) • You can also generate snapshot files based on timed events

14. Tip 10: Don’t Spend Weekends in the Office • Identify key performance use cases and test during development, don’t wait for calls from production support team • Look at automating the collection of performance snapshot information in the evening to save your day time hours for investigation and coding

15. Tip 11: Collaborative Performance analysis • Many investigations involve more than one person. • Share the snapshot file with others to get their opinion • Your call graph pruning and isolations are saved with the call graph • You can share the interactive user interface (heap graph) between users

16. Tip 12: Profiling for Everyone • All developers can profile, but not all might be able to determine the best changes to make • JProbe concurrent licensing model allows for greater occasional use for reduced cost compared to per developer licensing models • Save your expert time for the really hard issues

17. JProbe The market-leading Performance tuning toolkit for Java application code. Includes: • JProbe Profiler • JProbe Memory Debugger • JProbe Threadalyzer • JProbe Coverage

18. Complete Lifecycle Coverage 24x7 application monitoring and management • Our solution covers all phases of the custom application lifecycle • Benefits: • Accelerated diagnosis and root-cause resolution for production problems • Application confidence from testing early, testing often to production management with an integrated toolset. Application-level code assurance Certify applications before deployment JProbe PerformaSure Foglight JClass • Design and architecture • Code optimizations • Code enhancements • Model application load behavior for performance and scalability • Certify for SLA’s • Baselining / trend analysis • Real-time event management • SLA measurement • Problem management

19. PerformaSure- J2EE Diagnostics • What transactions are slow? • Where are my transactions spending their time? • Web server, App Server, Database?? • What was my system behavior at a particular point in time? • What component is the root-cause of the problem? PerformaSure provides a correlated transaction-centric analysis of the application across the J2EE stack. Works in production and pre-production environments.

20. Time View: Identify Slowest Requests Identify which transactions are the slowest • Where are my transactions spending their time? • Web server • App Server • Database??

21. Tag and Follow Reconstruction of the true transaction execution path

22. Next Tips and Tricks – Quest JProbe Memory Debugger Friday January 30th, 2004 11:00 am PST, 2 PM EST Any Questions?