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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
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A look back: our company’s first 3 months and first 1000 user registrations
In the last days of January, the number of Plumbr users exceeded an important milestone - we now have more than 1,000 users! As we started offering Plumbr as a public beta in the beginning of November last year, we can say that „collecting“ the first 1,000 customers took us 3 months. Let's dive into the numbers (we are big fans of factual proof!), and elaborate on what we did to get here and what are we about to do next.
Filed under: Plumbr
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Leak detection improvement – Plumbr 1.0RC4 is available!
This announcement is dedicated to the next step in the product maturity. Fair amount of users have reported false alarms: they say that Plumbr is too sensitive and claims objects to be leaking even if those objects occupy less than 1% of heap. We have good news for you: based on the hundreds of samples of Java application object lifecycles we have gathered, the detection algorithm has been tweaked to be more „suspicious“, ie. it now avoids most of the false alerts by collecting some more evidence before announcing the verdict.
Filed under: Product Updates
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Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 5) – JDK Tools
In our last blog post on the "Solving OutOfMemoryError" series we looked at profilers and concluded that profiling alone doesn't help you solve memory leaks.Today we will talk about the command line tools that are bundled with the Oracle JDK and can be used to find memory leaks. The benefit of knowing the bundled tooling is obvious: they are available everywhere where Oracle's Java is installed, i.e. often also in these test and production environments where other fancy tools are either not installed.
Filed under: Memory Leaks
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Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 4) – memory profilers
Our past experience, which is supported by a quick search on Google and Stackoverflow, shows that the first set of tools people tend to jump to when solving memory problems in production is memory profilers. Among them, VisualVM, YourKit and JProbe seem to be the most popular. So lets see how those famous solutions perform through a case study.
Filed under: Memory Leaks
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How much should our product cost?
Until now we've been focusing on developing the software – we believe that a company without a superb solution is worth nothing. However, as we also have mortgages to pay, there rose the question of our product’s revenue stream. And hence the problem – what would be the revenue model of Plumbr and how much should it cost?
Filed under: Plumbr
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A new release is available – upgrade to 1.0RC3!
We are happy to announce Plumbr 1.0RC3 - a new release that greatly improves speed and leak detection accuracy, includes a demo application for fast demoing of Plumbr and fixes some smaller bugs. We are a big step closer to finally releasing the first official Plumbr 1.0, and perhaps also removing the BETA tag from our logo.
Filed under: Product Updates
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What does it cost to start a company?
Everyone and your mom is speaking about how easy and cheap it is to launch a company in 2011. We fell into that trap and launched one. This article describes our experience in the field - was it easy and/or was it cheap? Read on to find out - in the following 1600 words or so we will describe more or less chronologically the steps we took and how much these cost.
Filed under: Plumbr
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Let them talk
On our quest to solve every memory leak in the Java world we get in touch with many teams who struggle with performance issues of their applications. Every developer tries to solve these differently. Some begin with vmstat or top, others with a CPU profiler or a DB load monitoring tool. Many of them turn to different APM products, like CA APM, AppDynamics, dynaTrace, etc. However, if you properly ask the application, it will normally give you all the information you need for performance tuning. And you can get the info without relying on indirect metrics of the operating system or the JVM.
Filed under: Performance