Review: JProbe Suite 5.0.1
Summary
Performance, this ever-elusive boon can be a challenge for J2SE
and J2EE application developers alike. The more programmers
contributing to an application, the more likely these issues
(memory leaks, threading stalls, etc.). are to appear and often
by the time they are discovered it is too late. The software has
shipped. The server is down. Whatever the situation, the end
result is the same, massive headaches, late night pagings, 24-hour
and weekend fix it sessions. In most situations an ounce of
prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Quest's JProbe arrives on the scene to deliver such
prevention. This software suite of tools can help Java
developers find potential issues in their code--before it is too
late.
Introduction
I know, most of you write perfect code. I understand completely;
I do too. However, sometimes I have to use other programmer's
code and in such circumstances, I have to make sure it is going
to perform properly. That's where Quest Software's JProbe can
help. The JProbe suite includes four basic tools that can help
developers look for potential performance issues in their coding
(or in our situation, other peoples' coding...) The four tools
are as follows:
- The JProbe Profiler looks for issues
line-for-line and method-by-method in your Java classes.
- The JProbe Memory Debugger looks for
memory leaks and potential garbage collection issues.
- The JProbe Threadalyzer analyzes
application thread usage, looking for potential deadlocks
and race issues.
- JProbe Coverage tracks what code
within an application has been tested.
While each of these tools performs a specific task, they all
share a number of features and benefits. For starters, all of
these tools perform quite well considering the overhead that
must certainly occur for this type of application. Additionally,
all of the sessions, or code chunks to analyze that are
created within one application can be shared within the others.
This makes for a smooth performance testing process. On top of
the JProbe console and monitoring tools, all of the applications
will output their results in textual format for custom analysis
and archiving purposes. Finally, and this is especially
beneficial for J2EE developers, sessions can be monitored from
remote locations just about as easily as they can be from local
ones.
Setup and Installation
Installation of JProbe (on my WinXP laptop) was as easy as you
would hope, just download, click the executable and follow
through the steps. Once installed, the user must go through a
mildly annoying licensing process that works with the quest.com
Web site and requires the number of CPUs and network name of the
computer to be transmitted to Quest. Although this can be
tedious we have to understand that software piracy is a problem
and these types of processes have become necessary.
Configuration of JProbe--as with most debugging programs--is
somewhat of a chore, though overall not as bad as you might
expect. The beauty is that JProbe will work with a lot of
different J2EE application servers. The beast is that getting
them configured requires a little work and some trial and error.
Fortunately, they do have a visual tool to enter information.
You will need to specify the JVM you are using with your
application server. JProbe will not get that information from
the application server so be sure you enter the correct one.
Each application segment you analyze in JProbe will require you
to set up a different session. To set these up, you will need to
enter the application server used, the classes to test, etc.
JProbe can save these files so you can refer to them at a future
date and share them between all of the applications within the
JProbe suite.
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