Measuring Web application session resource consumption - java

I have this web application that i have created using Wicket, Guice and JPA. I would like to advise my clients on the resource consumption of the application so that i can also advice him on the optimum hardware to purchase. What is the best way of measuring the Memory and CPU consumption per session as well as the network bandwidth requirements? Area there tools for undertaking such measurements?

jConsole is now part of the standard JDK and can be used to monitor a JVM. Of course, you will need to create some reasonable load on your application before you measure anything significant. To crete load, have a look at projects like OpenSTA, Apache jMeter, ...

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How to find the system requirements for java ee web application

We make a Java EE Web Application that runs on TomEE and we sell it to different customers, my boss asked me yesterday if there's a way to calculate the application ROM, RAM and CPU requirements based on the the number of clients our customer is expecting to have daily.
Is there a tool or a technique to find this information?
The application is expected to receive, analyze and store electronic invoices.
This is almost entirely dependent on your application. TomEE itself is very lightweight, startup with no apps occurs in a few ms and the memory idle overhead is about ~20mb, depending on what features your application uses. TomEE generally is a constant factor when it comes to scalability.
The scientific way to calculate the production values for your application is to perform load testing experiments and monitor it with a profiler. Simulate a bunch of users with JMeter or Selenium IDE. Monitor your application via JMX and jvisualvm and track the histograms. Monitor your CPU, garbage collection cycles, and heap memory as you add users and figure out if application scales linearly or exponentially.
Good luck!

Tools to JVM/AS monitoring

I'm researching about the tools that are helpful to monitoring the JVM(memory, processor, number of threads) and/or the use of Application Server resources during the application production (requests, number of the EJBs in the pool etc etc).
I know only the jconsole and the VisualVM
What else Do you know? For what purpose do you use?
Thanks a lot =]
Thanks for the answers until now. Does someone know some tool to monitoring WebLogic?
Try JavaMelody also.
https://code.google.com/p/javamelody/
jhat - to get memory dump on server
jstack - to get traces for all current threads and see if there are deadlocks
jmap - for heap summary view
jstat - performance stats
those tools are console-based and easy to use on servers without GUI
WAS ISC has built-in PMI (Performance Monitoring Infrastructure) - it allows to collect all performance data per server that you mentioned.
You can check RHQ Platform. It allows you to manage and monitor not only JVM but also many other services. These solution is especially useful when you use some JBoss server.
But it also quite complicates and better suited for production environment.
Here is link: http://www.jboss.org/rhq
The official tool of IBM for Websphere Monitoring is the IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Application Diagnostics (ITCAM for AD) which together with IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) Platform gives you a complete picture of what is happing in your production server along with alerts, historical data, some actions when an event happens etc.
Alternatively you may try solutions such as Health Center provided with Support Assistant or use an open source monitoring system such as Nagios and use plugins that can monitor the Websphere environment.
If you just want to troubleshoot a problem quickly and not need a full monitoring product with alerts, historical data etc you may just use the Performance Viewer app (located in Monitoring and Tuning > Performance Viewer > Current Activity from Admin Console) to get all the metrics you mentioned.

Java Webapp Performance Issues

I have a Web Application, Made entirely with Java. The Webapp doesn't use any Graphical / Model Framework, instead, the webapp uses The Model-View Controller. It's made only with Servlet specification (Servlet ver. 2.4).
The webapp it's developed since 2001, and it's very complex. Initially, was built for work with Tomcat 4.x/5.x. Actually, runs on Tomcat 6.x. But, we still having memory Leaks.
In Depth, the specifications of The Webapp can resumed as:
Uses Servlet v. 2.4 Specification.
It doesn't use Any Framework
It doesn't use JavaEE (Not EJB)
It's based on JavaSE (With Servlets)
Works Only on IE 6+ (Because of it's age)
Infrastructure Specification
Actually, the webapp works in three environments:
First
IBM Server (I don't remember exactly the model)
Intel Xeon 2.4 Ghz
32GB RAM
1TB HDD
Tomcat (Version 6) is configured to use 8GB of RAM
Second
Dell Server
Intel Xeon 2.0Ghz
4GB RAM
500GB HDD
Tomcat (Version 5.5) is configured to use 1.5GB of RAM
Third
Dell Server
Amd Opteron 1214 2.20Ghz
4GB RAM
320GB HDD
Tomcat (Version 6) is Configured to use 1.5GB of RAM
Database specification
The webapp uses SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition as a DBMS, except for the user of the first server-specification, that uses SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition. For the connection pools, the app uses Apache DBCP.
Problem
Well, it has very serious performance issues. The webapp slow down continually, and, many times Denies the Service. The only way to recover the app is restarting The Apache Tomcat Service.
During a performance Audit, i've found several programming issues (Like database connections that never closes, excesive use of Vector collection [instead of ArrayList]).
I want to know how can improve the performance for the app, which applications can help me to monitoring the Tomcat performance and the Webapp Memory usage.
All suggestions are gladly accepted.
You could also try stagemonitor. It is an open source performance monitoring library. It records request response times, JVM metrics, request details including a call stack (profile) of the called methods during the request and more. Because of the low overhead, you can also use it in production.
The tuning procedure would be the following.
Identify slow requests with the Request Dashboard
Analyze the stack trace of the request with the Request Detail Dashboard to find out about slow methods
Dive into your code and try to optimize those slow methods
You can also correlate some metrics like the throughput or number of sessions with the response time or cpu usage
Analyze the heap with the JVM Memory Dashboard
Note: I am the developer of stagemonitor.
I would start with some tools that can help you profiling the application. Since you are developing webapp start with Lambda Probe and Java melody.
The first step is to determine the conditions under which the app starts to behave oddly. Ask yourself few questions:
Do performance issues arise right after applications starts, or overtime?
Do performance issues are correlated to quantity of client requests?
What is the real performance problem - high load on the server or lack of memory (note that they are related, so check which one starts first)
Are there any background processes which are performing some massive operations? Are they scheduled to run at some particular time period?
Try to find some clues before going deep into code. It will help you to narrow down possible causes.
As Joshua Bloch has stated in his book entitled "Effective Java" - performance issues are rarely the effect of some minor mistakes in source code (although, of course, misuse of Java constructs can lead to disaster). Usually the cause is bad system (API) architecture.
The last suggestion based on my experience - try not to think that high memory consumption is something bad. Tomcat will use as much memory as operating system and JVM will let him (not more than max settings) and just when it needs more - Tomcat will perform garbage collection. So a typical (proper!) graph of memory consumption looks like a saw. If you are dealing with memory leak, then the graph will be increasing constantly, but indefinitely. This is the most often misunderstood of memory leaks, so keep it in mind.
To be honest - we cannot help you much further. Those are just pointers, now you will have to make extensive research to figure out the cause :)
The general solution is to use a profiler e.g. YourKit, with a realistic workload which reproduces the problem.
What I do first is a CPU only profile, a memory only profile and finally a CPU & Memory profile on at once (I then look at the CPU profile results)
YourKit can also monitor your high level operations such a Java EE resources and JDBC connections. I haven't tried these as I don't use them. ;)
It can be a good idea to improve the efficiency even if its not the cause of the problem as it will reduce the amount of "noise" in these profiles and make your issues more obvious.
You could try increasing the amount of memory available but a suspect it will just delay the problem.
Ok. So I have seen huge Java applications run lesser configurations. You should try to do the following -
First connect a Profiler to your application and see which part of your application takes the most time. You can use JProfiler or Eclipse MAT ( I personally prefer JProfiler). Also try to take a look at the objects taking the most memory. This will help you narrow down to the parts which you need to rewrite to improve the performance.
Once you have taken a look at the memory leaks update your application to use 64bit JDK(assuming it already does not do so)
Take a look at your JVM arguments and optimize them.
You can try the open source tool Webapp Watcher in order to identify where in the code is the performance issue.
You have first to add a filter in the webapp (as explained here) in order to record metrics, and then import the logs in the WAW Analyzer tool and follow the steps described in the doc to know where is the potential performance issue in the code.

Use of JMX and How to use for existing applications

We have distributed web application developed few years back on JDK 5.
How JMX will help this application?
1) Will it help me to monitor performance (Memory, CPU and Network & Disk IO)?
2) If so then application is deployed in multiple servers,how can I monitor in one single dashboard?
3) Do I have to make any new code changes to the existing application or can I monitor without code changes?
4) What else can we do apart from performance monitoring? Because name is Management Extensions (MX) what can we manage and how? It seems primary objective is not monitoring, it is management?
I couldn’t get much about JMX from the tutorial provided in Oracle website http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/jmx/overview/why.html. It seems some business representative prepared this tutorial not a techie.
Can anyone help me in understanding this JMX stuff, your efforts are sincerely appreciated.
Thanks,
Your Friend.
JMX is a standardized way of getting information out of a running system and to invoke operations on it. The JVM gives you a set of MBeans through which you can access runtime data like memory consumption, GC stats and some more data. You can also invoke a number of operations. Your app server will also give you a number of MBeans which you can use to control the server and installed applications.
Yes, it will give you some performance data. See http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/management/overview.html for a list of resources.
This depends on your application server. If it support clustered environments, it will probably give you a dashboard.
If you are fine with the standard JVM and app server MBeans, you won't need do any changes. But you may want to write your own MBean to give specific application status and statistics or ways to control your application. See http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/jmx/mbeans/standard.html
Well, you can do anything you like in a standardized way.
Take a look at jconsole (included in the JDK) to see what JMX offers for you!

Scalability of a single server for running a Java Web application

I want to gain more insight regarding the scale of workload a single-server Java Web application deployed to a single Tomcat instance can handle. In particular, let's pretend that I am developing a Wiki application that has a similar usage pattern like Wikipedia. How many simultaneous requests can my server handle reliably before going out of memory or show signs of excess stress if I deploy it on a machine with the following configuration:
4-Core high-end Intel Xeon CPU
8GB RAM
2 HDDs in RAID-1 (No SSDs, no PCIe based Solid State storages)
RedHat or Centos Linux (64-bit)
Java 6 (64-bit)
MySQL 5.1 / InnoDB
Also let's assume that the MySQL DB is installed on the same machine as Tomcat and that all the Wiki data are stored inside the DB. Furthermore, let's pretend that the Java application is built on top of the following stack:
SpringMVC for the front-end
Hibernate/JPA for persistence
Spring for DI and Security, etc.
If you haven't used the exact configuration but have experience in evaluating the scalability of a similar architecture, I would be very interested in hearing about that as well.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I think I have not articulated my question properly. I mark the answer with the most up votes as the best answer and I'll rewrite my question in the community wiki area. In short, I just wanted to learn about your experiences on the scale of workload your Java application has been able to handle on one physical server as well as some description regarding the type and architecture of the application itself.
You will need to use group of tools :
Loadtesting Tool - JMeter can be used.
Monitoring Tool - This tool will be used to monitor various numbers of resources load. There are Lot paid as well as free ones. Jprofiler,visualvm,etc
Collection and reporting tool. (Not used any tool)
With above tools you can find optimal value. I would approach it in following way.
will get to know what should be ratio of pages being accessed. What are background processes and their frequency.
Configure my JMeter accordingly (for ratios) , and monitor performance for load applied ( time to serve page ...can be done in JMeter), monitor other resources using Monitor tool. Also check count of error ratio. (NOTE: you need to decide upon what error ratio is not acceptable.)
Keep increasing Load step by step and keep writting various numbers of interest till server fails completely.
You can decide upon optimal value based on many criterias, Low error rate, Max serving time etc.
JMeter supports lot of ways to apply load.
To be honest, it's almost impossible to say. There's probably about 3 ways (of the top of my head to build such a system) and each would have fairly different performance characteristics. You best bet is to build and test.
Firstly try to get some idea of what the estimated volumes you'll have and the latency constraints that you'll need to meet.
Come up with a basic architecture and implement a thin slice end to end through the system (ideally the most common use case). Use a load testing tool like (Grinder or Apache JMeter) to inject load and start measuring the performance. If the performance is acceptable - be conservative your simple implementation will likely include less functionality and be faster than the full system - continue building the system and testing to make sure you don't introduce a major performance bottleneck. If not come up with a different design.
If your code is reasonable the bottleneck will likely be the database and somewhere in the region 100s of db ops per second. If that is insufficient then you may need to think about caching.
Definitely take a look at Spring Insight for performance monitoring and analysis.
English Wikipedia has 14GB data. A 8GB mem cache would have very high hit/miss ratio, and I think harddisk read would be well within its capacity. Therefore, the app is most likely network bound.
English Wikipedia has about 3000 page views per second. It is possible that tomcat can handle the load by careful tuning, and the network has enough throughput to server the traffic.
So the entire wikipedia site can be hosted on one moderate machine? Probably not. Just an idea.
-
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm
Tomcat doesn't allow for spreading over multiple machines. If you really are concerned about scalability, you must consider what to do when your application outgrows a single machine.

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