This session discusses how you can maximize the performance of your application deployment with tools that are native to your server platform as well as cross-platform Java analysis and monitoring tools. The session begins with systematic steps you can take to locate a performance problem in a complex system and moves on to analysis you can do to understand the root cause of the problem. The picture is completed by consideration of the tools and techniques available to monitor application performance in normal operation so that you can catch performance issues before they build up into serious problems. Presented at JavaOne 2012 Video available from Parleys.com: https://www.parleys.com/talk/the-hidden-world-your-java-application-what-its-really-doing

1. Chris Bailey – IBM Java Service Architect
4th October 2012
Practical Performance
Understand and improve the performance of your application
1
© 2012 IBM Corporation

2. Important Disclaimers
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PRESENTATION IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
WHILST EFFORTS WERE MADE TO VERIFY THE COMPLETENESS AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED
IN THIS PRESENTATION, IT IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
ALL PERFORMANCE DATA INCLUDED IN THIS PRESENTATION HAVE BEEN GATHERED IN A CONTROLLED
ENVIRONMENT. YOUR OWN TEST RESULTS MAY VARY BASED ON HARDWARE, SOFTWARE OR INFRASTRUCTURE
DIFFERENCES.
ALL DATA INCLUDED IN THIS PRESENTATION ARE MEANT TO BE USED ONLY AS A GUIDE.
IN ADDITION, THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PRESENTATION IS BASED ON IBM’S CURRENT PRODUCT
PLANS AND STRATEGY, WHICH ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE BY IBM, WITHOUT NOTICE.
IBM AND ITS AFFILIATED COMPANIES SHALL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE
OF, OR OTHERWISE RELATED TO, THIS PRESENTATION OR ANY OTHER DOCUMENTATION.
NOTHING CONTAINED IN THIS PRESENTATION IS INTENDED TO, OR SHALL HAVE THE EFFECT OF:
- CREATING ANY WARRANT OR REPRESENTATION FROM IBM, ITS AFFILIATED COMPANIES OR ITS OR THEIR
SUPPLIERS AND/OR LICENSORS
2 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

3. Introduction to the speaker
■ 12 years experience developing and deploying Java SDKs
■ Recent work focus:
– Java applications in the cloud
– Java usability and quality
– Debugging tools and capabilities
– Requirements gathering
– Highly resilient and scalable deployments
■ My contact information:
– baileyc@uk.ibm.com
– http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbaileyibm
– http://www.slideshare.net/cnbailey/
3 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

4. Goals of the Talk
■ Introduce a simple general methodology for performance analysis
■ Discuss the common performance bottlenecks
■ Show how to analyse a simple application
4 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

5. Agenda
■ Approaches to performance
■ Layers of the application
■ Identifying and resolving performance issues
5 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

6. Approaches to performance
■ Outside in approach
– Start from where performance can be measured
– Work along the activity path
– Ideal for identified performance problems
■ Layered approach
– “Bottom up” or “Top down”
– Analyze and eliminate layers of the application
– Simplify the problem as you go
– Ideal for application health check
■ A hybrid of both approaches can often be useful
6 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

7. Performance baseline
■ Important to have a repeatable and representative performance test
■ Measure baseline performance
– Internal measurements affect the performance of what your measuring
– External measurements have less impact on system performance
■ Where possible, measure multiple times
– Variation will occur between test runs
■ Where possible, ensure consistency
– Not just the load test that's run
– State of machine and network can have interesting effects
7 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

8. Page response performance benchmark: baseline
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
10000
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
8 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

9. A Layered Approach
■ Three layers of a deployment:
– Infrastructure: Machine hardware and Operating System
– Java Runtime: Garbage collection
– Java Application: Java application code
■ Each can suffer from resource constraints, typically:
– Memory
– CPU
– Synchronization
– I/O
9 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

10. Infrastructure
■ Typical resource constraints:
– Memory: insufficient physical memory results in paging/swapping
– CPU: insufficient CPU time limits throughput of the application
– I/O: insufficient I/O limits throughput of the application
– Synchronization driven by Java runtime/Java application
■ Easy to diagnose
■ Easy to resolve (relatively)
■ Note that each can also be caused by deficiencies higher up the stack!
10 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

11. Infrastructure: Memory usage
■ Infrastructure uses memory for:
– Backing the process data: OS runtime, Java runtime, Java application
– Caching of IO: filesystem and network buffers
■ Lack of physical memory causes:
– Reduction and removal of IO caching
– Paging/swapping of process memory to disk
■ Paging/swapping is costly for a Java process
– Particularly affects Garbage Collection performance
• Paging usually occurs on Least Recently Used basis
• All of Java heap is traversed during mark and sweep phases
• Least Recently Used does not work well for the Java heap
11 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

12. Infrastructure: CPU usage
■ Insufficient CPU time availability will reduce performance
■ Can occur periodically:
– Cron Jobs running batch applications
– Database backups
■ Or during periods of high load:
– System becomes CPU bound, limiting performance
12 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

13. Detecting infrastructure issues
■ Detect using Operating System level tools
■ Memory on Windows:
– Paging: using “perfmon” with “Process” counter for “Page Faults/sec”
– File Cache: using “perfmon” with “Memory” counter for “System Cache Resident Bytes”
■ CPU on Windows:
– Per process: using “perfmon” with “Process” counter for “% Processor Time”
– Per machine: using “perfmon” with “Processor” counter for “% Processor Time”
■ IO on Windows:
– Network: using “perfmon” with “Network Interface” counter for “Output Queue Length”
– Disk: using “perfmon” with “Physical Disk” counter for “Current Disk Queue Length”
13 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

14. Paging in perfmon
14 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

15. Resolving infrastructure issues
■ Add more physical resources to the process
– Assign more to the: Machine, Guest OS, LPAR, Zone, etc
■ Reduce the physical resource requirements
– Reduce the application footprint
– Reduce the application CPU usage
– Reduce the IO
15 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

16. Page response performance benchmark: Baseline
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
10000
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
16 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

17. Page response performance benchmark: Paging removed
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
Baseline
No Paging
10000
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1}
Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1
Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3
Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2}
servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4}
Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2
Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Shopping_2_4
Page URL
Page URL
17 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

18. Effect on page performance
– PlantsByWebSphere 1.7%
– servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} 22.8%
– servlet_ShoppingServlet 0.3%
– Shopping{1} 0.4%
– Shopping{4} 21.4%
– Shopping_1_1 17.9%
– Shopping_2_2 2.8%
– Shopping_2_3 16.7%
– Shopping_2_4 24.1%
– Shopping_2_5 13.8%
■ Improvement in page performance of 0.3% to 24.1%
– Without outliers: 0.4% to 22.8%
■ Biggest gains are on most performant pages. Total gain is only ~4%
– Relatively small effect on overall page performance
18 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

19. Garbage Collection Pause Times
19 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

20. Garbage Collection Pause Times
20 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

21. Effect on Garbage Collection Pause Times
■ Reduction in:
– Maximum pause time: 38%
– Average pause time: 13%
– Time spent in GC 11%
■ Large effect on GC performance, particularly pause times
21 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

22. Java runtime
■ Typical resource constraints:
– Memory: insufficient Java heap results in OutOfMemory or high GC overhead
– CPU garbage collection overhead, or driven by Java application
– Synchronization driven by Java application
– IO driven by Java application
■ Easy to diagnose
■ Easy to resolve (relatively)
22 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

23. Java runtime memory
■ Java runtime uses memory for:
– Java Heap(s), Java Virtual Machine (JVM), “Native” heap, OS and C-language runtime
0 GB 2 GB 4 GB
-Xmx
OS and C-Runtime JVM Java Heap(s)
0x40000000 0xC0000000
0x0 0x80000000 0xFFFFFFFF
■ Java heap(s) are managed using Garbage Collection
■ Other memory usage can be indirectly driven by application usage and garbage collection
– eg. Java Threads
Java Heap Native Heap
23 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

24. Java runtime problems
■ Insufficient Java heap memory leads to:
– OutOfMemoryError due to Java heap exhaustion
– Garbage Collection running excessively, increasing CPU and affecting performance
■ Insufficient non-Java (“native”) heap leads to:
– OutOfMemoryError due to process address space exhaustion
– Driver for Java heap garbage collection (DirectByteBuffer cleaners)
24 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

25. Detecting Java runtime problems
■ Log and trace analysis:
– “Native” heap: OS level logs (ps, svmon, perfmon)
– Java heap: verbose:gc output
– Post processed using:
IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer
(GCMV)
■ Live monitoring:
– “Native” heap IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Health Center
– Java heap: IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Health Center
Visual VM, Mission Control
25 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

26. Too Frequent Garbage Collection
26 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

27. Garbage collection performance
Heap Size
Too Frequent Garbage Collection
Memory
Heap Occupancy
Long Garbage Collection Cycles
Time
27 JavaOne Session 23401 – The Hidden World of Your Java Application and What its Really Doing © 2011 IBM Corporation

28. Resolving Java runtime problems
■ Add more resources to the Java runtime
– Java heap: Increase Java heap size
– Native heap: Move to 64bit or reduce Java heap size
■ Reduce the memory requirements
– Reduce the Java application footprint
28 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

29. Increased Java heap size
29 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

30. Effect on Garbage Collection Pause Times
■ Reduction in:
– Time spent in GC 59%
■ However this is only 4.84% of total time
30 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

31. Page response performance benchmark: Baseline
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
10000
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
31 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

32. Page response performance benchmark: Paging removed
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
Baseline
No Paging
10000
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1}
Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1
Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3
Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2}
servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4}
Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2
Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Shopping_2_4
Page URL
Page URL
32 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

33. Page response performance benchmark: Java Heap size increased
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
No Paging
10000 Bigger Heap
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
33 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

34. Page performance improvements
– PlantsByWebSphere 0.4%
– servlet_ShoppingServlet 0.0%
– servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} 33.2%
– Shopping{1} +0.6%
– Shopping{4} 4.5%
– Shopping_1_1 2.9%
– Shopping_2_2 0.1%
– Shopping_2_3 2.1%
– Shopping_2_4 14.2%
– Shopping_2_5 8.2%
■ Improvement in page performance of -0.6% to 33.2%
– Without outliers: 0.0% to 14.2%
■ Total gain is only ~4%
– Relatively small effect on overall page performance
34 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

35. Java application
■ Typical resource constraints:
– Memory: insufficient caching affects application throughput and responsiveness
– CPU: insufficient threading causes limits on scalability
– Synchronsation: synchronized resources limits scalability and throughput of the application
– I/O: blocking on I/O limits throughput and responsiveness
■ Hard to diagnose
■ Can be expensive (or impossible!) to resolve
35 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

36. Java application CPU usage
■ High CPU usage by Java methods highlight areas of potential optimization
– Code is being invoked more than it needs to be
• Easily done with event driven models
– An algorithm is not the most efficient
• Easily done if performance is not the focus at development time
■ Fixing CPU bound applications requires knowledge of what code is being run
– Identify methods which are suitable for optimisation
• Optimising methods which the application doesn’t spend time in is a waste of your time
– Identify methods where more time is being spent that you expect
• “Why is so much of time being spent in this trivial method?”
36 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

37. Java application synchronization
■ Throughput does not increase linearly with load
■ At limit of throughput the CPU is still low
– Inability to scale
– Not all CPU can be utilized
– Limit on throughput and responsiveness
■ Bottleneck where threads need to synchronize with each other for application correctness
– Caused by large numbers of threads requiring synchronized resource at the same time
– Caused by long hold time by thread that owns resource
– Or a mixture of both
37 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

38. Health Center: application method CPU usage
38 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

39. Health Center: application synchronization
39 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

40. ShoppingServlet.deliberateSlowMethod()
private void deliberateSlowMethod() {
// ----------------------------------------------------------------
// User clicked on the Tulips, let's tip toe through a
// slow method
// ----------------------------------------------------------------
System.out.println("==> STARTING SLOW METHOD");
long timestamp = System.currentTimeMillis();
long target = timestamp + SLOWTIME;
System.out.println("timestamp="+timestamp);
System.out.println("resume at="+target);
while(timestamp < target) {
timestamp = System.currentTimeMillis();
}
System.out.println("==> ENDING SLOW METHOD");
}
40 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

41. Page response performance benchmark: Baseline
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
10000
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
41 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

42. Page response performance benchmark: Paging removed
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
Baseline
No Paging
10000
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1}
Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1
Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3
Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2}
servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4}
Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2
Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Shopping_2_4
Page URL
Page URL
42 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

43. Page response performance benchmark: Java Heap size increased
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
No Paging
10000 Bigger Heap
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
43 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

44. Page response performance benchmark: deliberateSlowMethod() changed
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
No Paging
10000 Bigger Heap
App Fix
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
44 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

45. Page performance improvements
■ servlet_ShoppingServlet 80.8% 5x improvement
■ Shopping{1} 94.3% 20x improvement
■ Improvement in page performance of 80 and 95%
– 5x and 20x improvement for affected pages
■ Total gain of 48%!
45 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

46. Health Center: application method CPU usage
46 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

47. Health Center: application synchronization
47 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

48. Summary
■ Importance of:
– Repeatable benchmark
– Incremental measurements as changes are made
– Repeated testing and verification
■ Tools are available to help you see what's going on:
– Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer (all vendors)
– HealthCenter (IBM only)
– Other profilers (eg. YourKit) (all vendors)
– Memory Analyzer (all vendors)
48 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

49. Page response performance benchmark: Summary
Page Performance
PlantsbyWebSphere
20000
15000
Avg Latency (microseconds)
Baseline
No Paging
10000 Bigger Heap
App Fix
5000
0
servlet_ShoppingServlet Shopping{1} Shopping_1_1 Shopping_2_3 Shopping_2_5
PlantsByWebSphere servlet_ShoppingServlet{2} Shopping{4} Shopping_2_2 Shopping_2_4
Page URL
49 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

50. Summary
■ Infrastructure resources affect performance
– Paging and Garbage Collection much less than you might expect
– However, beware of CPU “starvation” from other processes!
■ Vast majority of performance gains are in the application!
50 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

51. References
■ Get Products and Technologies:
– IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java:
• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/tools/
■ Learn:
– Health Center InfoCenter:
• http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/hctool/v1r0/index.jsp
■ Discuss:
– IBM on Troubleshooting Java Applications Blog:
• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/troubleshootingjava/
– Health Center Forum:
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=1461
– IBM Java Runtimes and SDKs Forum:
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=367&start=0
51 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation

52. Copyright and Trademarks
© IBM Corporation 2012. All Rights Reserved.
IBM, the IBM logo, and ibm.com are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business
Machines Corp., and registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.
Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies.
A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web – see the IBM “Copyright and trademark
information” page at URL: www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
52 Practical Performance: Understand and Improve the Performance of Your Application © 2012 IBM Corporation