Month: January 2009

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jvisualvm: A free Java memory and CPU profiler

I needed to profile a Java application, and since we had a JProfiler floating license, I used it. JProfiler works well, although it’s pricey. I was googling for other Java profiling tools, and [stackoverflow.com](http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=visualvm) made mention of [jvisualvm](https://visualvm.dev.java.net/), which comes bundled with JDK 6 release 7. I noticed that on my Fedora 10 box, the java-1.6.0-openjdk package includes jvisualvm. None of my coworkers had heard of it.

JProfiler introduces a significant performance penalty into the code it profiles, whereas other tools including jvisualvm and YourKit have a much lower impact. I’m going to give jvisualvm a try, once I get the target environment set up properly with the new JDK.

UPDATE: jvisualvm won’t profile remote applications like JProfiler can. jvisualvm is not quite as easy to use, and I haven’t figured out how to get stack traces on the CPU and memory hot spots. Overall, I like the tool.

UPDATE 2: jvisualvm can be configured to give a stack trace of memory hot spots. I’ve learned that performance between the Java 1.5 and 1.6 jvms can be very different. I’ve learned that I can run ‘kill -3 ‘ to print a stack trace of my running java processes. It’s helped me to narrow down bottlenecks in an application when the profiler wasn’t granular enough.

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The future of Gnome Apps: JavaScript?

There’s an interesting article called “[Building desktop Linux
applications with JavaScript](http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/javascript-gtk-bindings.ars?bub)” By Ryan Paul, January 19, 2009.

I didn’t immediately understand the vision. Don’t we already have
Python, Ruby, Java, C++ and Perl bindings for Gnome? Yes, we do. So why
would we add JavaScript to the mix? Or any other scripting language?

The best way to think about it is Firefox plugins, like Greasemonkey,
that actually modify the web browser to give you a new experience.
Firefox extensions are written in JavaScript. JavaScript has hooks into
the application (Firefox) to manipulate it.

Gnome hackers want to do the same thing for Gnome. Not only could you
write Gnome application in JavaScript, you could extend a Gnome
application using JavaScript, no matter what language it was written in.

Another way to think about it is this: When most people think of Java,
they don’t think of the language. They think of the platform — the
libraries that are shipped with the language (networking, database
connectivity, etc.). The same is true for Python, Perl, and Ruby.

The goal is to us an embeddable language to tweak the Gnome platform,
not to use a platform (like Java, Python or Perl) to tweak Gnome. When
they embed a language into Gnome, application developers will use the
Gnome platform way of doing networking, instead of doing it the Java
library way. They will use the Gnome way of opening file picker, not the
Java library way. They will use the Gnome way of doing HTTP, not the
Python or the Java or the Perl way.

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Fedora 10 lacks “wow” appeal; OpenSolaris 11

I upgraded one of my machines to Fedora 10 last month, and for me, this release lacks the “wow” appeal that other releases have had. A minor annoyance is that the keyboard repeat delay [is broken](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=475747) for me and so far, there is no fix other than disabling keyboard repeat. On the plus side, Fedora 10 includes OpenOffice.org 3 and other [new](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/ReleaseSummary) [features](http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/features/print/112093). Be sure to check out the [Common Issues](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F10Common) people have experienced with Fedora 10.

The other day, a co-worker handed me an OpenSolaris 11 Live CD. I booted it, expecting to be underwhelmed like I was with the Solaris 10 JavaDesktop. I was pleasantly surprised, however. Sun’s “Nimbus” GNOME theme knocks the socks off of the boring Fedora window manager themes. The experience felt like I was running Linux. It was responsive, supported my newer hardware, and the system was built with GNU utilities on the command line so I get my favourite options to ‘ls’, ‘grep’, etc. It supported my NVidia card out-of-the box, and had Compiz eye-candy as an option. The only thing I missed (in my superficial test) was the familiar ‘yum’ and ‘rpm’ for package management. I suspect that if I used it from day to day, I’d find other things I miss. Does OpenSolaris support encrypted file systems? Does it have as much optional software as I can get with Fedora Extras?

I’ll keep my eye on [OpenSolaris](http://www.opensolaris.com/) a little more closely in the future.