Profiling WebLogic 10.3.5 with YourKit 10.0.0

http://www.yourkit.com/docs/10/help/agent.jsp

see also http://www.torsten-horn.de/techdocs/jee-oracleweblogic.htm#YourKit


In brief, if you are lazy:

in YourKit, Tools/Integrate with standalone Application Server, choose WebLogic 9/10,
provide location of the startup script (not necessarily startWebLogic.cmd, if you are profiling a Managed Server you will provide C:\bea1035\user_projects\domains\osb_domain\startms1.cmd )

(I choose JVM 32bit)

YourKit will generate a C:\bea1035\user_projects\domains\osb_domain\startms1_with_yjp.bat

who simply inserts a

set JAVA_OPTIONS=-agentpath:C:\PROGRA~2\YOURKI~1.0\bin\win32\yjpagent.dll=disablestacktelemetry,disableexceptiontelemetry,builtinprobes=none,delay=10000,sessionname=WebLogic %JAVA_OPTIONS%


before my startManagedWebLogic.cmd

Make sure that in the agentpath parameters you specify also port=11001 if port 10001 is already in use. YourKit says that it dynamically chooses another port but this didn't work for me.

Remove disablestacktelemetry (anyway you can still disable it runtime with a button).

In "Capture Memory Snapshot", enable HPROF format.

Hibernate Cascading on flushing

this snapshot (taken with YourKit profiler) shows the tremendous performance impact of cascading the flush to dependent objects - even if nothing has to be written to the DB.

Basically if you have
Employee {
String name;
Company company;
}

and you update/flush Employee, the blessed hibernate will try to flush also Company; And if Company contains other dependent objects, the process will go on forever and eat all your CPU.

CascadeType should be NONE by default.

As you can see here
http://www.docjar.com/docs/api/org/hibernate/event/def/AbstractFlushingEventListener.html

there are quite a lot of operations involved when persisting stuff.


So the message is: avoid as much as you can doing "find" operation in a transaction where you do updates (this will autoflush at every find). Also avoid cascading operations on dependent objects.

YourKit Java Profiling

it's really neat and very easy to install and use:

http://www.yourkit.com

how to add an agent to your application:

http://www.yourkit.com/docs/95/help/running_with_profiler.jsp

To profile an application running in JBoss is very easy:

do Tools/Integrate with JEE server and provide location of your run.bat file,
it will create a run_with_yjp.bat for you.

To profile Java 5, you must use the old version (8).