Keep JVM running on iseries - java

We are calling a Java program on a iseries machine and the first call to the program is quiet slow. The following calls are fast but if we wait a certain time the call is slow again.
How can I keep the JVM up and running or is there another way to solve this problem?
Thanks

The newest JVM's (IBM Technology for Java) are the fastest available. The typical problem is that if the JVM's own jars are cached in memory then it is quite fast to load - if not, they need to be loaded from disk as needed which is quite slow. (There is actually an accelleration process for this under Windows).
You could consider having a small script which simply reads through all the jars for the JVM every X seconds, or to implement a "communicate with daemon JVM through dataqueues" which is the traditional approach for this.

You might want to consider making your java application a server that is running all the time ... your native app can send & receive requests to the server using tcp or data queues.
That way the start up cost for the server is a one time thing and none of the users never have to suffer through it.

Allocate more memory to the subsystem the JVM is running in.
Do not call a static method because by definition a static class doesn't have to stay in memory.
Do call methods with *this.
Good Luck

Related

Is there any way to divide server resources between users of Java application?

I wonder if there is any possibility to split the users of Java application running under Tomcat by server resources?
Problem description
We have an application written in Java and running under the control of Tomcat server. Sometimes users could possibly do some actions leading to 100% charge of server during a long period of time. That requires some limitation of server resources per user to disable him to make a server crash.
For a moment the only idea I've come up with is to containerize all the application in Docker and launch a separate resource-limited container for each user. It looks like missing an easier solution.
How do you intend to split Server resources?
Memory is shared across the JVM and you cannot limit given memory for a certain Thread. Spawning a new process it the only way to further limit memory in an easy and maintainable way.
If you want to avoid that, you would probably have to rework your memory intensive method.

Java Web App has a high rate of CPU consumption

I'm new here and I'm not that very good in CPU consumption and Multi Threading. But I was wondering why my web app is consuming too much of the CPU process? What my program does is update values in the background so that users don't have to wait for the processing of the data and will only need to fetch it upon request. The updating processes are scheduled tasks using executor library that fires off 8 threads every 5 seconds to update my data.
Now I'm wondering why my application is consuming too much of the CPU. Is it because of bad code or is it because of a low spec server? (2 cores with 2 database and 1 major application running with my web app)
Thank you very much for your help.
You need to profile your application to find out where the CPU is actually being consumed. Java has some basic profiling methods built in, or if your environment permits it, you could run the built in "hprof" compiler:
java -Xrunhprof ...
(In reality, you probably want to set some extra options: Google "hprof" for more details.)
The latter is easier in principle, but I mention the possibility of adding your own profiling routine because it's more flexible and you can do it e.g. in a Servlet environment where running another profiler is more cumbersome.
Paulo,
It is not possible for someone here to say whether the problem is that your code is inefficient or the server is under spec. It could be either or both of those, or something else.
You are going to need to do some research of your own:
Profile the code. This will allow you to identify where your webapp is spending most of its time.
Look at the OS-level stats that are available to you. This might tell you that the real problem is memory usage or disk I/O.
Look at the performance of the back-end database. Is it using a lot of CPU?
Once you have identified the area(s) where the CPU is being used, you need to figure out the real cause of the problem is and work out how to fix it. And once you've got a potential fix implemented, you can rerun your profiling, etc to see it has helped.

Tuning a WebService

I have a webservice created with CXF. In my service I run an application witch is very time consuming.
My application takes about 30 minutes to be executed but inside the webservice it takes about 1 1/2 hours.
Is there something I can do that my service gets faster?
There isn't any good reason for such a difference (assuming your doing the same work). You are going to have to work out what is different about enviroment or the input parameters you are using.
Try turning on -Xverbose:gc it may be that you have just about maxed out the heap on the servlet container and the JVM is speading it's whole life running the garabage collector over and over again.
Note you can also see using jvisualvm which comes with the JDK for free.
I would have a look at the application with jvisualvm in the Sun JDK.
My guess is that you have too little memory in your web service container, and that all the time is spent garbage collecting.
There really isn't enough information here to solve the issue, you need to figure out what is going on use some sort of tracing/profiling mechanism. It could be a memory issue. I don't know how you're actually launching the app, but it could be that its getting assigned a very low priority thread, vs a more user (high) priority thread when being launched by JUnit. The webservice itself would long time out before half an hour passed, let alone 1.5 hours, so are you using an ASync service or launching your own thread and/or process from the service? If its a separate process, how much memory is being allocated to that?
Once you've gathered this information, you're probably well on your way to really getting your answer.
YMMV

tomcat isolate webapps

multiple webapp running on same tomcat using same jvm. sometime, one webapp that have memory leak will cause entire jvm to crash and affect other webapps. any recommendation how to isolated that without need to use multiple jvm and tomcat
Within the same JVM everything shares the the same memory. There is no system to allocate separate pools or quota.
If one of your applications behaves really badly in this regard, the only thing you can do is run it isolated in a separate JVM (separate Tomcat).
Are the applications running as separate processes? Or the same one?
First off you should look at profiling to find the memory leak https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1716597/java-memory-leak-detection-tools.
However, as a quick solution from inside you could use Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory() to see how much memory is in use, and if it grows above a certain limit, and you know which app is causing the problem, you could restart that app.
You could also try running System.gc() which is a terrible way to do it, and really shouldn't be used as it can be ignored by the JVM.
To the best of my knowledge, the short answer is: No, it can't be done. Tomcat uses a single memory space for all running apps.
My knee-jerk response is that you should fix the memory leak rather than trying to isolate the misbehaving app. Cure is better than quarantine. As I don't know the details of your problem, maybe this isn't practical for some reason.
You can't isolate apps in the same JVM (though you can do things like instrument a particular apps ClassLoader for diagnostics)
If your concern is administration/configuration though (and not total memory consumption) you can run multiple instances of Tomcat off the same install by using catalina.home and catalina.base
JSR 121 was designed to solve this, but it hasn't been implemented yet.
There is no standard system in Java to truly isolate memory used by web applications.
However, you could write some byte-code weaving logic to track how much memory a particular app has allocated. If it goes over a particular threshold, you could throw an exception and stop the app from allocating anymore memory. What do you want to do if you could track all the memory consumed by a web app? What are you trying to implement?
Note that this would only really work effectively for figuring out how much memory a webapp has allocated, not how much it is currently consuming in the system. In order to get that metric, you'd have to byte-code weave finalize() for all objects. Since finalize() gets run in a best-effort fashion by the JVM, this may not get you the most accurate value should the system be under load. The JVM would deprioritize these finalize threads and your value will never get updated even though objects have been cleaned up.
To bring this up to date, it is now possible to run multiple applications on a single JVM. Applications run in isolated java virtual containers which protect your applications from 'noisy neighbours' as well as allowing you to share resources across your applications. This gives you isolation, elasticity and increased application density for Apache Tomcat. Download it from www.elasticat.com NB I do work for Waratek who developed this new JVM

How to detect Out Of Memory condition?

I have an application running on Websphere Application Server 6.0 and it crashes nearly every day because of Out-Of-Memory. From verbose GC is certain there are the memory leaks(many of them)
Unfortunately the application is provided by external vendor and getting things fixed is slow & painful process. As part of the process I need to gather the logs and heapdumps each time the OOM occurs.
Now I'm looking for some way how to automate it. Fundamental problem is how to detect OOM condition. One way would be to create shell script which will periodically search for new heapdumps. This approach seems me a kinda dirty. Another approach might be to leverage the JMX somehow. But I have little or no experience in this area and don't have much idea how to do it.
Or is in WAS some kind of trigger/hooks for this? Thank you very much for every advice!
You can pass the following arguments to the JVM on startup and a heap dump will be automatically generated on an OutOfMemoryError. The second argument lets you specify the path for the heap dump file. By using this at least you could check for the existence of a specific file to see if a heap dump has occurred.
-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
-XX:HeapDumpPath=<value>
I see two options if you want heap dumping automated but #Mark's solution with heap dump on OOM isn't satisfactory.
You can use the MemoryMXBean to detect high memory pressure, and then programmatically create a heap dump if the usage (or usage delta) seems high.
You can periodically get memory usage info and generate heap dumps with a cron'd shell script using jmap (works both locally and remote).
It would be nice if you could have a callback on OOM, but, uhm, that callback probably would just crash with an OOM error. :)
Have you looked at JConsole ? It uses JMX to give you visibility of a variety of JVM metrics, including memory info. It would probably be worth monitoring your application using this to begin with, to get a feel for how/when the memory is consumed. You may find the memory is consumed uniformly over the day, or when using certain features.
Take a look at the detecting low memory section of the above link.
If you need you can then write a JMX client to watch the application automatically and trigger whatever actions required. JConsole will indicate which JMX methods you need to poll.
And alternative to waiting until the application has crashed may be to script a controlled restart like every night if you're optimistic that it can survive for twelve hours..
Maybe even websphere can do that for you !?
You could add a listener (Session scoped or Application scope attribute listener) class that would be called each time a new object is added in session/app scope.
In this - you can attempt to check the total memory used by app (Log it) as as call run gc (note that invoking it will not imply gc will always run)
(The above is for the logging part and gc based on usage growth)
For scheduled gc:
In addition you can keep a timer task class that runs after every few hrs and does a request for gc.
Our experience with ITCAM has been less than stellar from the monitoring perspective. We dumped it in favor of CA Wily Introscope.
Have you had a look on the jvisualvm tool in the latest Java 6 JDK's?
It is great for inspecting running code.
I'd dispute that the you need the heap dumps when the OOM occurs. Periodic gathering of the information over time should give the picture of what's going on.
As has been observed various tools exist for analysing these problems. I have had success with ITCAM for WebSphere, as an IBMer I have ready access to that. We were very quickly able to indentify the exact lines of code in out problem situation.
If there's any way you can get a tool of that nature then that's the way to go.
It should be possible to write a simple program to get the process list from the kernel and scan it to see if your WAS process is still running. On a Unix box you could probably whip up something in Perl in a few minutes (if you know Perl), not sure how difficult it would be under Windows. Run it as a scheduled task every five minutes or so, and if the process doesn't show up you could have it fork off another process that would deal with the heap dump and re-start WAS.

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