Soon JavaOne, Oracle Develop and Oracle Open World will be here - this time at the same time and the same place! The huge conference(s) will take place in San Francisco September 19 - 23. This year JRockit will be represented in all three conferences. Here are two tables I've put together with all (AFAIK) JRockit related talks.

The sessions where JRockit team members are directly involved are:

Since I’m on vacation and the weather has been atypically good in Sweden, I haven’t really taken time to blog about the recent 4.0.1 release until now. It’s really a shame, since it is a very good release.

Yes. I know. It’s been in print for some days already, but I haven’t found time to write about it until now. The book is a good guide for JVM’s in general, and for JRockit in particular. If you’ve ever wondered how the innards of the Java Virtual Machine works, or how to use the JRockit Mission Control to hunt down problems in your Java applications, this book is for you.

Every now and then I get a question regarding what the attributes in the PerfCounters dynamic MBean represent. Now, all the MBeans under the oracle.jrockit.management (bea.jrockit.management pre R28) domain are part of what we call JMXMAPI (the JRockit JMX based Management API), which is unsupported. Therefore there is no official documentation for the API.

Just like with the old JRockit Runtime Analyzer, it is possible to start up recordings using command line parameters to JRockit. The parameter is called -XX:StartFlightRecording in R28.

Below is an example that starts a flight recording half a minute after the JVM has been started. The recording will last for a minute. The name when viewing the ongoing recordings will be MyRecording, and the resulting file will be written to C:\tmp\myrecording.jfr. The recording will use the settings in jre\lib\jfr\profile.jfs.

There is a lot of new data points in the JRockit Flight Recorder compared to the data available in the old JRA. One set of data deals with exceptions and where they are thrown. In JRA, it was possible to tell how many exceptions were thrown, but it was not possible to determine from where they were thrown.

Here is how to do a recording with exception profiling enabled from JRockit Mission Control.

1. Right click on the JVM to profile, select Start Flight Recording.

The new JRockit Flight Recorder has some very interesting properties. It can be used like the black box of an airplane, allowing users to go back in time and check what was happening around the time when something went wrong. Here is how to enable the default continuous recording in JRockit to allow for that use case.

The flight recorder is on by default in JRockit R28, the problem is that there is no recording running by default. To configure JRockit to start with the default recording running, add the parameter:

The next major release of JRockit is finally out! Here are some highlights:

Marcus Hirt

There are a bunch of JRockit related sessions at OOW 2009! Joy!

Here are the ones I am involved in:

Technology barriers that once prevented enterprises from adopting Java-based approaches for mission-critical applications with extreme, predictable computing needs have been breached. Recent advances throughout the entire Java stack put Java in a position to power the next generation of enterprise computing. Now customers can reap the benefits of a Java-based infrastructure, including higher developer productivity, fewer defects, a proven kernel, and adherence to standards.

Capital markets have complex, data-intensive front-office environments that change in milliseconds. To survive and differentiate themselves, companies need predictable, high-performance technical solutions. They also must control costs. Until now, satisfying both of these requirements was a difficult challenge. Standards-based Java technology could not meet low-latency demands, while C/C++ solutions inflated costs. Oracle JRockit Real Time solves this problem.

You may have noticed that ECM Licensing Document and OTN downloads were recently updated to include Oracle JRockit JVM with Content Conversion Server, ECM Suite, Universal Content Management, Universal Content Management Standard Edition, and Universal Records Management.

Since the 3.1 version of JRockit Mission Control, it is possible to extend JRockit Mission Control in various ways. The first extensibility features that we’re releasing are for the JRockit Mission Control Console, with the next major version featuring the same sort of extensibility for the Memleak and JRA tools as well.

With the new Experimental Update site, there are now PDE plug-ins for extending the JRockit Mission Control Console. The wizards greatly reduces the time needed to start writing your own tabs, actions and constraints.

This is basically a very short tutorial on how to use them.

Install the PDE plug-ins

With the new Experimental Update site, there are now PDE plug-ins for extending the JRockit Mission Control Console. The wizards greatly reduces the time needed to start writing your own tabs, actions and constraints.

This is basically a very short tutorial on how to use them.

Since the 3.1 version of JRockit Mission Control, it is possible to extend JRockit Mission Control in various ways. The first extensibility features that we’re releasing are for the JRockit Mission Control Console, with the next major version featuring the same sort of extensibility for the Memleak and JRA tools as well.

Finally! The new version of JRockit Mission Control is out! It features a much improved user interface, new extensibility features and an experimental update site that will go on-line as soon as we get the go from legal.

Hope you’ll like it! :)

You can download it from the JRockit Mission Control Home Page, either as a stand alone application, or as a set of Eclipse plug-ins that can be run in 3.3 or 3.4 versions of Eclipse.

Oracle(R) JRockit on NEC Delivers Up To Three Times More Performance than Competing Sun JVM and IBM JVM Results

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., March 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --

News Facts

March 15, 2009 —  When Oracle bought BEA Systems last year, many pundits viewed the purchase as a good move if Oracle could put together a sound strategy for integrating the various pieces BEA's product portfolio into something useful.

So you're in trouble. You've started a long running application. It's taken you half an hour to make the application reach a nice, optimized steady state. Maybe you started JRockit as a windows service. And you really didn't expect the need for having the external management agent up and running. Yet, here you are, longing to connect to the JRockit running your application using Mission Control from another machine. Perhaps to do some profiling, diagnostics or to hunt for a suspected memory leak. You start shutting down the JVM, and expect at least half an hour to pass unti... No!

Sometimes it may seem hard to get a simple thread stack dump from your JRockit. You may for instance have started it using the -Xnohup (-Xrs) option, or as a service. I'll list three different ways of looking at your threads in such situations.

Exception profiling is the business of finding out what exceptions are being thrown within your application and from where. In JRockit Mission Control you can find out how many exceptions have been thrown using JRA, and you can count the exceptions using the JRockit Management Console. Sadly there is no way of doing powerful exception profiling (i.e. looking at the stack traces for the exceptions, aggregating them and visualizing them directly in the JRockit Mission Control Client) just yet. This will be incorporated in a future version of Mission Control.

This year JRockit Mission Control will be represented at Oracle Open World! I'll have one session and three hands-on labs.

The preliminary schedule is as follows:

Date: 2008-09-21

Hands-On Lab: Diagnostics with Oracle JRockit Mission Control

Session ID: S299540
Track: Oracle Develop: Java
Room: Golden Gate B2
Start Time: 13:15

Date: 2008-09-22

The next version of JRockit Mission Control just went live! Feature-wise it is only a minor upgrade, I will go into detail about the most exciting one in a bit, but there are some other changes to this release that are quite profound.

The, in my humble opinion, greatest change is that all JRockit Mission Control features are available by default. There is no need to dabble with licenses. Everything is free to use for evaluation, which among other things means that you can now try out the latency analyzer properly.

Within the next few days, Mission Control will be available for download directly into your IDE from an update site.  To fully take advantage of this, however, you need to run Eclipse on a JRockit. This blog is an update to an old blog of mine, which explains how and has a few very specific tips for the insanely rich or the ones working for BEA. ;)

Despite JRockit being an outspoken server side JVM, many long running client applications, like IDE's, actually run very well on JRockit. Running Eclipse on JRockit is no exception.

JRockit Mission Control just got even better! Some improvements will be quite obvious and very visible. Other improvements are subtle usability fixes that simply makes Mission Control more pleasant to use. In this blog I'll briefly list some of the new features, in no particular order, as well as some new freely available services.

One of the parts of Mission Control is the JRA (the JRockit Runtime Analyzer). The JRA is a powerful profiler that can tell you a lot about the performance bottlenecks in your application whilst keeping the overhead barely noticeable.

The JRockit Memory Leak Detection tool (henceforth abbreviated Memleak) is part of JRockit Mission Control 2.0, the JRockit tools suite. It has served many people quite well in hunting for memory leaks in Java, i.e. hunting for the cause to why objects that shouldn't be in use still have references to them.

How to hunt for these memory leaks using the Memleak tool has been discussed to death, so this blog entry is going to show you other fun filled uses of the tool. ;)