Leak detection improvement – Plumbr 1.0RC4 is available!

We recently celebrated crossing the magic threshold of 1000 registered users. Around 10% of those one thousand early adopters have given us feedback in some form. There is a separate blog post in progress summarizing the first 1000, and our future plans (subscribe to our twitter feed to be notified!).

But this announcement is actually 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.

We encourage all users to upgrade.

In order to upgrade just download the new stable version and overwrite the Plumbr files on your hard drive (but keep the plumbr.lic license file intact). If you have not used Plumbr before and don’t have the license file, just request it by submitting your e-mail address at www.plumbr.io.

The short summary of the most important improvements in Plumbr 1.0RC4 release:

• The amount of false positives is greatly reduced. We have measured improvements of more than 30%, but the test collection at hand was admittedly somewhat biased towards the false positives.
• Improved leak size calculation, Plumbr now reports more accurate leak sizes.
• Plumbr now checks for sufficient file permissions before it starts leak detection.
• Usage improvements – more clear error and informative messages.
• Optimized memory and CPU usage – Plumbr now needs less resources itself.

What’s coming up next? Aggregating the feedback, we are starting to work towards solving the following issues:

• Introducing Java 5 support
• Making the installation and usage even simpler
• Detecting the leaking object in a better format (sometimes Plumbr reports several leaking objects, even if they are related – not a deal breaker, but still a nuisance)
• Announcing pricing and corporate licensing

Once again, we would like to thank all users who have sent us their feedback, be it via e-mail. Without your comments we wouldn’t know which direction should Plumbr development follow. Keep it up, and send us stories about the challenges you expose Plumbr to!