This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Other Useful Analyzer Tips
Another useful strategy to employ when using the Performance Analyzer is to look at the Timeline view in the Performance Analyzer GUI (see Figure 6-23).
The Timeline view provides a listing of all threads, one in each row of the listing, that executed during the time when the profile was collected. At the top of the Timeline view is a timeline of seconds that have passed since the initiation of the collection of the profile. If the recording of the profiling data is enabled at Java application launch time, then the timeline contains data since the launching of the Java application. For each horizontal row, a thread within the application, a unique color is used to distinguish the method the application was executing in at the time of the sample. Selecting a thread, one of the rows within a colored area shows the call stack, their method names in the Call Stack for Selected Event panel, executing at the time the sample was taken. Figure 6-24 is a screenshot of the Call Stack for Selected Event panel for the selected thread, thread 1.2 in Figure 6-23.
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Figure 6-23 Performance analyzer timeline view
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Figure 6-24 Performance analyzer's call stack for selected event panel
Hence, by looking at the timeline, you can determine which threads are executing in the program at any particular point in time. This can be useful when looking for opportunities to multithread single-threaded phases or operations in an application. Figure 6-23, shows the single-threaded program variant presented in the "Increasing Parallelism" section earlier in the chapter. In Figure 6-23, you can see from the timeline, from about 16 seconds to a little past 64 seconds, the thread labeled as Thread 1.2, is the only thread that appears to be executing. The timeline in Figure 6-23, suggests the program may be executing its initialization or beginning phase as a single threaded. Figure 6-24 shows a Call Stack for the Selected Event after clicking in the region of Thread 1.2 between the timeline of 16 seconds and 64 seconds. Figure 6-24 shows the call stack that's being executed during the selected thread and selected timeline sample. As you can see in Figure 6-24, a method by the name BailoutMain.populateDatabase() is being called. This is the method identified in the "Increasing Parallelism" section earlier in the chapter as one that could be multithreaded. Hence, this illustrates how you can use the Performance Analyzer to identify areas or phases of an application that could benefit from parallelism.
Another useful tip when using the Timeline view is make note of the range of seconds for some time period of interest that has caught your attention in the timeline. Then use the filtering capability to narrow the profile data loaded by the Analyzer GUI. After applying the filter, the Functions and Callers-Callees views show data only for the filtered range. In other words, filtering allows you to focus exclusively on the profile data collected within the period of interest. To illustrate with an example, in Figure 6-23, Thread 1.2 between 16 and 64 seconds is the only thread executing. To narrow the focus of the collected profile data to that particular time range, the Analyzer can be configured to load only the profile data between 16 and 64 seconds using the View > Filter Data menu and specifying 16-64 samples in the Filter Data form's Samples field as shown in Figure 6-25.
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Figure 6-25 Filtering the range of samples to view in performance analyzer
Filtering allows for the ability to eliminate data collected outside an area of interest, which leads to more accurate analysis since only the data of interest is being presented.
There are many additional features of the Performance Analyzer, but this chapter presents those likely to be the most useful when profiling and analyzing Java applications. Additional details on using Performance Analyzer for profiling Java applications, including the Java EE application, can be found at the Performance Analyzer product Web site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solarisstudio/overview/index.html.