Michael Kopp

In my last article I explained what a major Garbage Collection is. While a major Collection certainly has a negative impact on performance it is not the only thing that we need to watch out for. And in case of the CMS we might not always be able to distinguish between major and minor GC. So before we start tuning the garbage collector we first need to know what we want to tune for. From a high level there are two main tuning goals. Execution Time vs. Throughput The first thing we need to clarify if we want to minimize the time the application needs to respond to a request or if we want to maximize the throughput. As with every other optimization these are competing goals and we can only fully satisfy one of them. If we want to minimize response time we care about the impact a GC has on the response time first and on resource usage second. If we optimize for throughpu... (more)

Application Performance Monitoring in Production

Last time I explained logical and organizational prerequisites to a successful production level application performance monitoring. I originally wanted to look at the concrete metrics we need on every tier, but was asked how you can correlate data in a distributed environment, so this will be the first thing that we look into. So let’s take a look at the technical prerequisites of successful production monitoring. Collecting data from distributed environment The first problem that we have is the distributed nature of most applications. In order to isolate response time problems or... (more)

Major Garbage Collections - Separating Myth from Reality

In a recent article we have shown how the Java Garbage Collection MXBean Counters have changed for the Concurrent Mark-and-Sweep Collector. It now reports all GC runs instead of just major collections. That prompted me to think about what a major GC actually is or what it should be. It is actually quite hard to find any definition of major and minor GCs. This well-known Java Memory Management Whitepaper only mentions  in passing that a full collection is sometimes referred to as major collection. Stop-the-world One of the more popular definitions is that a major GC is a stop-the-w... (more)

How Garbage Collection Differs in the Three Big JVMs

(Note: If you’re interested in WebSphere in a production environment, check out Michael's upcoming webinar with The Bon-Ton Stores) Most articles about Garbage Collection ignore the fact that the Sun Hotspot JVM is not the only game in town. In fact whenever you have to work with either IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic you will run on a different runtime. While the concept of Garbage Collection is the same, the implementation is not and neither are the default settings or how to tune it. This often leads to unexpected problems when running the first load tests or in the worst case... (more)

Application Performance Monitoring in Production

Setting up Application Performance Monitoring is a big task, but like everything else it can be broken down into simple steps. You have to know what you want to achieve and subsequently where to start. So let’s start at the beginning and take a top-down approach Know What You Want The first thing to do is to be clear of what we want when monitoring the application. Let’s face it: we “do not want to” ensure CPU utilization to be below 90 percent or a network latency of under one millisecond. We are also not really interested in garbage collection activity or whether the database ... (more)