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Innocent until proven guilty
I would like to describe a recent case from my career as troubleshooter, which again reminds me that one should not put all his eggs into one basket. And that one should look around and use every possible tool from his toolbox, not just his favorite hammer. And that wrong and unverified assumptions are the most common reasons for long debugging sessions. And mostly of all: you should never jump to conclusions too fast!
Filed under: Memory Leaks
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Is $1,500,000 enough for a 1.0 release?
We in the Plumbr team decided that it is. Over the last few months in beta our customers have solved more than 200 memory leaks with the help of Plumbr. 200 leaks sounds cool, but how does it translate to money? You cannot force a leak to go away by just throwing piles of cash towards it.
Filed under: Plumbr
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Limiting your trials – by time or by features?
The sad truth is that nobody buys software solely based on a slick sales pitch. Everybody wants to get their hands on the piece of software first to find out whether they like it or not. And herein lies a pretty complicated problem - you want your users to fall in love with your product. At the same time you somehow want to limit the access to the product so that you can monetize it later. By and large you have two options here - either hand out a fully functional version of your software for a limited period of time and force users to convert to paid plans after the period passes or you somehow limit the functionality / capacity of the free version available. As most of the software industry tends to go with time-limited trials, so did we. But we soon realized we could do better.
Filed under: Plumbr
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Solving OutOfMemoryErrors (part 7) – APM tools as a solution?
Our series of posts about solving the OutOfMemoryError in our hypothetical production system nearing the conclusion. We have covered a number of different ways to attack OutOfMemoryErrors so far - profilers, JDK bundled tools and heap dump analyzers. Our today’s mercenaries will be Application Performance Management tools, or APMs.
Filed under: Memory Leaks
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Plumbr is mature: 1.0RC6 adds hot attach function
We are writing in from Tallinn Airport, on our way to San Francisco to the YCombinator interview. And we want to announce a major user interface update of our memory leak detector tool. This release of Plumbr is special also in another way: it is the final feature release before the official Plumbr 1.0. From this point on, we will only improve infrastructure and fix possible bugs, but will not add to the functionality any more. Plumbr 1.0 will introduce paid plans, which means that now is the last opportunity to use a feature-complete Plumbr for free.
Filed under: Product Updates
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On estimating the time it takes to solve a memory leak
Throughout the decade of being responsible for delivering various IT projects I have involuntarily developed a reflex - whenever I hear someone saying "Our application has a memory leak", I immediately get shivers running down my spine. The thing is - you can never estimate the amount of time it takes to solve the leak. Moreover - if the problem is in production, it means immediately allocating the best developer(s) in the team for an impossible-to-estimate period of time, and dropping everything else they were doing.
Filed under: Memory Leaks
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Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 6) – Dump is not a waste
Let us continue our series of posts about solving the OutOfMemoryError in our hypothetical production system. We have described different methods to tackle the problem, and today's post concentrates on what you can learn from heap dumps. Spoiler alert: with a bit of luck, you can get very close to solving the OOM.
Filed under: Memory Leaks
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Plumbr 1.0RC5 is available – doubling the number of supported environments
When I ask our users what they think about Plumbr, most of the replies fall into three categories. First those who love it, the installation was a snap and I found the memory leak in my app" (or "... don't have any leaks at the moment, but will continue to use Plumbr"). Then those who think it is a nice concept, but unfortunately couldn't get it to work, because my environment is apparently not supported. And last those who thought that it looked interesting and I downloaded it to play around, but haven't yet had time to use it. We are excited to say that we've taken a huge step further of eliminating the second answer listed above. With the update today we approximately doubled the number of different environments that can benefit from Plumbr. The new version brings support for Java 5, JRockit and IBM Java Virtual Machines, and a plethora of application servers that weren't supported before.
Filed under: Product Updates
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Plumbr, blind and silent
Here's the news for you: Java memory leaks have attitude, and you need to know your way around to successfully nail and solve them. While this blog post is written in response to people who became confused while using our product for discovering memory leaks, it should serve some food for thought for other leak hunters as well. I got an email a couple of days ago. The author had tried Plumbr on a self-made leaking test application and, to his disappointment, instead of getting a beautiful leak report he got an OutOfMemoryError. He was not the first one sending us such comments, and from the fair amount of feedback we've gathered so far we've begun seeing some patterns in how people use Plumbr.
Filed under: Product Updates
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What is a memory leak?
When we talk to people about our solution for discovering memory leaks we immediately get positive feedback. But when we add Java into the equation, the initial excitement is often complemented with questions: “Are there memory leaks in Java? Isn't Java a garbage-collected language?” In this post I will explain why memory leaks are in fact a common problem for Java applications.
Filed under: Memory Leaks