Java Applet starts up very slowly for some users? - java

[UPDATE: I forgot to add that this 30 sec. freezing problem only happens the first time I try to load a file from the server. Subsequent loads are very quick. Maybe some strange reverse DNS lookup? I am hosting on Google's appengine.]
I started a little project recently called http://www.chartle.net which is build around an applet.
Startup time is an important factor in the user's experience of an applet. I collect statistics and am shocked that I find often very long startup times (factor 50 to 100 higher then necessary)
The applet starts in 1-3 seconds depending on the speed of your computer and connection. Still for some users it takes up to 100 sec.
I have mixed results from my own tests. Mostly it is very fast but sometimes freezes the browser for a long time and the Java console doesn't tell me why. Best guess is, that it stalls when loading a saved chart.
Please help me figuring this out - best test by opening an already saved chart (click on one of the 'create' links at http://www.chartle.net/gallery)
Cheers,
Dieter

This is generic help rather than specific for your demo (which loaded fine for me in a few attempts).
Freezing applets
In the JDK bin directory there is a very handy programme called jstack. Refresh your browser window until it crashes and then run:
jstack *process_id*
This will give you the stack trace of any frozen Java process. If Java is not a separate process then you can use the browser's process (eg for Opera).
The following few problems were/are common for me:
I reccommend you use invokeLater rather than invokeAndWait on the init method (although you can't do this if you use start/stop methods)
Opera's custom java plugin acts very poorly...
Deadlocks caused by synch blocks and invokeAndWait's
Slow applets
Possibly the browser is fetching resources from the server, unable to use the jar file?

It may be that only the old plugin causes these problems. That means basically all people running on OSX and other users with Java prior to 1.6_update_10.
So, I would really appreciate people with such setups to watch their Java console and describe the first startup behaviour.
Cheers,
Dieter

Related

OpenJdk initial startup time very slow

I'm running openjdk 11.0.3 on a server. Whenever the server has been rebooted (every night): For the first initial launch of my Application, the users have to wait for 35 Seconds before the Application is even started. (Before the first System.out.println is written from main Method.) (subsequent launches are very fast though)
I have tried the following option to debug this:
-Xlog:class+load:file=classload.txt
Here are the most important finds:
...
[2.284s][info][class,load] jdk.internal.loader.URLClassPath$FileLoader source: jrt:/java.base
[5.032s][info][class,load] sun.security.rsa.RSASignature$SHA1withRSA source: jrt:/java.base
…
[5.051s][info][class,load] java.util.LinkedList$Node source: jrt:/java.base
[8.121s][info][class,load] pos.LFChangeable source: file:/C:/Users/rho/AppData/Roaming/edapp/pos.jar
…
[8.135s][info][class,load] java.io.FileNotFoundException source: jrt:/java.base
[10.584s][info][class,load] sun.reflect.misc.ReflectUtil source: jrt:/java.base
…
[11.744s][info][class,load] java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException source: jrt:/java.base
[34.853s][info][class,load] jdk.internal.logger.DefaultLoggerFinder source: jrt:/java.base
Why is it hanging for 23 Seconds between loading java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException and jdk.internal.logger.DefaultLoggerFinder? And what about the other seconds of slowdowns?
edit:
Based on the comments, I will clarify some.
This is a windows rdp server. Actually, it is more than one server, but the problem persists on all servers.
The Application is a standalone Application. So every morning there are problems as users who log in to start the Application, will try to start it multiple times when "nothing happens".
I have now tried restarting one of the servers quite a few times, and this is what I found:
Starting my Application with java11 after reboot takes on average 40 seconds before the first System.out.println. Then it is only 1-2 Seconds before my first JFrame shows.
Starting my Application with java8 (sun) after reboots takes on average 16 Seconds before the first System.out.println. But I then get a 25 second delay before my first JFrame shows.
Starting my Application with java11 after already started with java8 takes on average 4-6 seconds.
Your application might be suffering from the absence of a “class data-sharing (CDS) archive”. Such an archive allows much faster loading of standard classes and has been generated by default by some installers of previous versions, but OpenJDK 11 does not have an installer.
This is addressed by JEP 341:
Currently, a JDK image includes a default class list, generated at build time, in the lib directory. Users who want to take advantage of CDS, even with just the default class list provided in the JDK, must run java -Xshare:dump as an extra step. This option is documented, but many users are unaware of it.
So while this JEP is about JDK 12 doing the necessary steps automatically, it also mentions the fix for JDK 11: just run java -Xshare:dump on the command line once, to generate the archive.
Note that you can improve the startup time even further by including application classes in the CDS. See also the Class Data Sharing section of the JDK 11 documentation.
I have now tested extensively, and I am prepared to publish my results, along with the 2 different "solutions" that I made.
First, let me explain my application a bit. It is a swing enterprise-application that started it's life 13 years ago, and has been extended every since.
This application therefore is big, does a lot of different things (although most users uses only a portion of it), and has about 120 jar-files on it's classpath including all the third-party-jars.
As previously mentioned, after restart of the server it takes 35 seconds before my first login-JFrame is shown.
Solution 1:
This was my first solution, and is not a solution to the slow start, but more a solution to the user not starting multiple instances of the application.
I noticed that although my application was very slow on the first initial start, other applications were not.
A workaround was therefore to make a small standalone-application to display the splash screen, that I start like this in my program:
splashProcess = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("javaw -jar splash.jar");
Later I just kill it off with
splashProcess.destroy();
Note that if I should create a splashscreen with new JFrame() instead, it would take the usual 35 seconds before it is displayed.
Solution 2:
While testing, I found out I could simulate a restart by just deleting all the jar-files and copying them back.
In addition to reduced testing time, I found out that starting the application with just the 4-5 jar-files needed for the initial startup was very fast (although that would have lead to ClassNotFoundExceptions later),
this also ment that I could try to figure out which jar-file which led to the hang, by starting by copying all jar-files back, and then omitting one and one more.
However, I found out that it was not one jar-file that was to blame. The seconds it takes before the application start was steadily reduced a little bit each time I removed some jar-files.
So, it seems that the problem is that the first time I call new JFrame() in my application, java seems to build some sort of index or something of all classes in the classpath, although they are not used at this time.
I don't know why it does this, but this process takes quite some time with 120 jar-files on the classpath.
This led me to solution nr 2. When my application now starts, I check for an argument "startSilent".
If this is present, the only thing my application does is show a new JDialog with size 0,0 and then call System.exit(0);
I then made a script that runs my application with the "startSilent"-parameter that starts when the user logs in.
Now, if the user logs into the server and waits at least 35 seconds before starting our application, the start is now lightning fast, as the application has already started and exited once, so that the "classpath-index" or whatever it is has been built.
If the user starts the application after a shorter time, the start-time is reduced by how long the silent-script has already run.
(And the start will always be at least a fair degree faster than before, as the script starts before the desktop is ready).
So these are the results of my findings. I hope other will find them useful, and if someone can explain why what I call the "classpath-index" is created as it is, I would be welcome.

Java server application slow after period of idleness (Windows)

I'm having trouble with a Jetty 9 server application that seems to go into some kind of resting state after a longer period of idleness. Normally the memory usage of the Java process is ~500 MB, but after being idle for some time it seems to drop down to less than 50MB. The first request that comes takes up to several seconds to respond whereas requests are normally on the scale of tens of milliseconds. But after one or two requests it seems like the application is back to it's normal responsive state.
I'm running on the 32-bit Oracle Java 8 JVM. My JVM configuration is very basic:
java -server -jar start.jar
I was hoping that this issue might be solvable through JVM configuration. Does anyone know if there's any particular parameter to disable this type of behavior?
edit: Based on the comment from Ivan, I was able to identify the source of the issue. Turns out Windows was swapping parts of the Java process out to disk. See my own answer below for a description of my solution.
Based on the comment from Ivan, I was able to identify the source of the issue. Turns out Windows was swapping parts of the Java process out to disk. This was clearly visible when comparing the private working set to the commit size in the task manager.
My solution to this was two-fold. First, I made a simple scheduled job inside my server app that runs every minute and does a simple test run to make sure that the important services never go inactive for long periods. I'm hoping this should ensure that Windows doesn't regard the related pages as inactive.
Afterwards, I also noticed that the process was executing with "Below normal" priority. So I changed the script that starts the server to ensure that it's running with "High" priority going forward. This seems likely to affect swapping behavior and may very well also have been enough to resolve the issue on it's own, but I only found it after already deploying my first solution so that remains unclear. In any case, everything seems to be working as it should now.

web start jar validation getting slower with each Java update

We have an (Eclipse RCP) application of 90MB with 139 self-signed jars which starts in 8s without Web Start and in 10s in an older version of Java 7. We configured Java to not use the browser proxy, i.e. deployment.proxy.type=0.
With each update of Oracle's Java startup performance drops. It takes more and more time to fully start up:
7u60/7u65/8u25: 13s (starts after 5s of web start processing)
7u75: 23s
8u31: 20s
8u40: 29s
8u51/8u60ea: 32s
What can I do to solve this issue?
From the trace/logs I can see that it is very probable that this slowdown is completely due to validating the cached jars taking much more time. Note that this question is similar but doesn't provide the following details:
Diagnosis:
When cached, the update check runs in only 0.5s (server returns "304 Not
Modified"), but even with a full download it takes only a few seconds on the gigabit network.
After the update check, for each jar XXX there is a log entry:
validating cached jar XXX.jar
When this is done, com.sun.javaws.Main is started after which the same validation seems to happen again and takes about the same amount of time, then the application starts.
The time spent in validating the cached jars seems to correspond to
the extra time required before the application starts.
The web start splash screen always shows for about 2 seconds corresponding to the update check and is then hidden. Then after almost 20 seconds the Java console finally appears and my application actually starts.
During the delay, jp2launcher.exe uses about 16% processor time on a quad core with hyperthreading (8 logical cores). So it looks like it is fully using one of the logical processors.
What I have already tried but did not make any difference:
clearing web start cache (countless times)
configure deployment.properties to disable certificate revocation check (as well as blacklist.check and validation.ocsp, validation.crl)
running offline
using the version download protocol
add to site exceptions list
check web server logs for problems. None found, update check runs in about 500ms for all 138 jars.
use another web server
checked certificate expiration date 17 feb 2016
validated my jnlp with JaNela and found no serious issues
create a deployment rule set to allow the application to run unsigned in order to speed up validation. This should be possible and looks like a promising way to solve this, but I could not get it working. See also my answer on this post.
configured Java to "do not start the console"
Detail: some weird behavior on 7u60
In 7u60 the application is started after about 5 seconds, after which the Java console APPEARS to be doing the jar validation in the background while the application is already started. HOWEVER the .log file reports that the application gets started AFTER all the validations are done. It reports this as 25 seconds and then shows the first System.out of my application which actually happened after only 5 seconds or so. It also shows the jar update check with the server taking 10 times as long as reported by the server. So I guess this is an issue with the logging framework lagging behind! Haven't seen this on 8u51.
Not an answer per se (yet), but I found that Java 8u25 when tracing is enabled, only generate a single trace file. 8u51 generates two files, one from the JVM used to update the application and other to run it. This is new (two JVM startups) and I think is related to the new setting for using native Windows sandbox capabilities. The problem is that it shouldn't have to validate the signatures again on the second JVM. The separation on two JVM instances always happen no matter if the setting for using native sandbox is disabled (the default).
I reported a regression bug, will edit the answer if I get an answer from Oracle.
Note: Java 8u31 still runs everything on one JVM but have the same doubled startup time the question stated.

java gwt a script is causing the browser to run slowly

I have a web application written in java gwt. When opening the website in IE8 there always popups the message that says 'A script on this page is causing your web browser to run slowly'
The message only appears in IE8 no higher version and not in FF or Chrome!
Since the application is written in java gwt its pretty difficult to debug the javascript code , is there another possibility to determine the problem?
The application also has many asynchronous calls a database might that be the problem?
This message means that JavaScript blocks browser thread for quite a long time.
Its implementation in IE8 is really silly. It counts number of JavaScript lines of code (instructions) it executes and if it reaches certain threshold this message is shown.
Actually this limit is configured in Windows registry, by default it is 5000000 or something like that. It could be increased, which is not a recommended solution of course.
One of the ways to avoid this message is to use GWT DeferredCommand. If you could split the work being done to chunks small enough not to trigger IE8 guard constraint you will be fine. Also try to merge multiple asynchronous requests into as few as possible and improve rendering logic, potentially shifting from Widgets to UI Binder or plain DOM.
This is related question (Disabling the long-running-script message in Internet Explorer)
I would slightly disagree on - "java gwt its pretty difficult to debug the javascript code"
MSDN article for disabling slow script warning only hides the problem.
The slow script warning occurs when you have a heavy for loop or deep recursive call. This can happen in 2 scenarios -
1) Poorly coded client side processing logic - example tree navigation
2) Deep object graph in rpc.
You can quickly isolate the trouble spot if you familiarize yourself with
1) Using Speed Tracer - https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/speedtracer/
2) Using GWT logging - https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideLogging
3) Using Chrome Dev Tools & Firebug to capture timeline, profiling etc
4) IE8 has profiling , but it is darn slow and cumbersome.
5) Use GWT Pretty mode instead OBF mode when profiling.
Once you are sure which part of the code is causing the slow script warning Just FIX it.
Because some scripts may take an excessive amount of time to run, Internet Explorer prompts the user to decide whether they would like to continue running the slow script.
If the Generated Cache.js Javascript file is some what in big size that message may come .
So The message box for Internet Explorer versions 4.0, 5.0, 6, 7, and 8 come with a message
Read this article on MS blog
And refer the below question
a script on this page is causing ie to run slowly

unresponsive java application for no reason

I have a java application that I run from eclipse 3.5.
My OS is WinXP(SP2) and the JRE version is 6.05.
I run the application on two identical computers (or so I think) but the application behaves differently on each computer.
The computers are the same Dell Optiplex model with the same amount of memory and have the same GPU.
On the first computer, the application runs flawlessly. However, on the second one the application freezes for a couple of minutes and then returns to run normally.
The strange thing is that the CPU usage on the second computer is not high at all. It seems as though my application does not receive any CPU for no apparent reason.
Computers should be deterministic so I assume there must be some difference between the machines but I don't know where to look.
I would love some ideas on where the problem might be.
Thanks,
Yoav.
I've found the problem.
The application that was unresponsive was run in debug mode.
Sorry to have wasted your time...
It may help you to get a Thread Dump when the app freezes. This will hopefully tell you exactly what is holding you up (i.e. waiting for IO somewhere).
Well, I would first update your JRE version as there are newer versions now.
As for both computers being identical, are they really identical? I find it difficult to believe that both have the same exact software and setup and that anything you have done to one, you have always done to the other. If this is indeed the case, you may want to try to debug your application on the second machine (the one that hangs) and find out specifically where it hangs.
It may also help us if you give more information about your application. The problem may not be your computer at all if the application is doing things like web access, network access, etc.
So both computers have nearly identical hardware. A few other things to check
Do they both have Eclipse 3.5, WinXP(SP2) and JRE 6.05 installed?
And behave differently when run from within Eclipse (on both machines or on one run from command-line)?
Is this reproducible? If yes When does it happen? On startup? Or on some specific action?
Does the program have a GUI?
Is there maybe some kind of virus scanner or another comparable software installed on one of the machines which could delay the program
Is networking, file acccess, multithreading involved?
I can think of two non-application possibilities:
Memory Paging. There's something extra happening on the slow machine, so your JVM is not getting a fair share of CPU time. A large daemon process or some such.
Network access. Your app is making some kind of network call and it's glitching or timeing out. Perhaps going and fetching some XML schema, perhaps a disk acesss to a mounted drive.
I've seen all manner of weirdness when apps attempt to access hosts by name and DNS is not well. One machine has an etc/host entry the other does not. Even each machine might want to resolve itself.

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