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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
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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