Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Beyond top: Command-Line Monitoring on the JVM ...
Search
Colin Jones
October 29, 2015
Programming
1
670
Beyond top: Command-Line Monitoring on the JVM (JavaOne 2015)
A session from JavaOne 2015
Colin Jones
October 29, 2015
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Colin Jones
See All by Colin Jones
A Bug's Life: What if `select` is Broken After All?
trptcolin
0
150
Underestimated costs of microservice architectures
trptcolin
3
1.5k
FP vs. OOP: Beyond the Bikeshed
trptcolin
0
420
Diving into the Details with DTrace! (RubyConf 2016 edition)
trptcolin
2
480
Diving into the Details with DTrace
trptcolin
3
510
Adopting FP: the good, the familiar, and the unknown
trptcolin
0
230
Finding out what's *really* going on, with DTrace!
trptcolin
1
370
Beyond top: Command-Line Monitoring on the JVM (ClojureRemote)
trptcolin
0
140
ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
trptcolin
2
180
Other Decks in Programming
See All in Programming
CSC305 Lecture 13
javiergs
PRO
0
330
O Que É e Como Funciona o PHP-FPM?
marcelgsantos
0
240
Towards Transactional Buffering of CDC Events @ Flink Forward 2025 Barcelona Spain
hpgrahsl
0
120
Developer Joy - The New Paradigm
hollycummins
1
400
エンジニアに事業やプロダクトを理解してもらうためにやってること
murabayashi
0
100
Blazing Fast UI Development with Compose Hot Reload (Bangladesh KUG, October 2025)
zsmb
2
440
コードとあなたと私の距離 / The Distance Between Code, You, and I
hiro_y
0
210
Leading Effective Engineering Teams in the AI Era
addyosmani
7
680
AkarengaLT vol.38
hashimoto_kei
1
130
alien-signals と自作 OSS で実現する フレームワーク非依存な ロジック共通化の探求 / Exploring Framework-Agnostic Logic Sharing with alien-signals and Custom OSS
aoseyuu
3
5.1k
フロントエンド開発のためのブラウザ組み込みAI入門
masashi
7
3.6k
React Nativeならぬ"Vue Native"が実現するかも?_新世代マルチプラットフォーム開発フレームワークのLynxとLynxのVue.js対応を追ってみよう_Vue Lynx
yut0naga1_fa
2
1.9k
Featured
See All Featured
Optimizing for Happiness
mojombo
379
70k
StorybookのUI Testing Handbookを読んだ
zakiyama
31
6.3k
Designing for Performance
lara
610
69k
Context Engineering - Making Every Token Count
addyosmani
8
330
A Tale of Four Properties
chriscoyier
161
23k
Why Our Code Smells
bkeepers
PRO
340
57k
Stop Working from a Prison Cell
hatefulcrawdad
272
21k
Why You Should Never Use an ORM
jnunemaker
PRO
60
9.6k
Building a Modern Day E-commerce SEO Strategy
aleyda
44
7.9k
Large-scale JavaScript Application Architecture
addyosmani
514
110k
Docker and Python
trallard
46
3.6k
RailsConf 2023
tenderlove
30
1.3k
Transcript
Beyond top(1) Command-Line Monitoring on the JVM Colin Jones @trptcolin
8th Light
None
What to expect
command-line tooling
on the JVM
introspection & serviceability
--all-flags=false
war stories
real-life usage (well, re-enacted anyway)
A long time ago in a software shop far, far
away…
Things are going pretty well
What does this thing look like? app-architecture Postgres Web /
API Application Server Load Balancer Periodic Job Application Server 3rd-party Service A 3rd-party Service B Monitored email account End users: native mobile app Admin users: desktop browsers
But strange things are afoot
the server sometimes gets really slow
the team has to manually restart the application server
incident response time is ~5 minutes
Yes, strange things are afoot
Pain, frustration, anger
Just the facts
sometimes, things get slow
all requests seem to be affected
the JVM stays up
restart the JVM and everything is fine
What could it be?
Demo
More facts, please!
constant full GCs
what’s in the heap
what application code was running
The right tools for the job
vmstat system-level: CPU, memory, disk, context switching
top per-process: CPU & memory
jps what’s our PID?
jstack status of all threads (right now-ish!)
jcmd what can’t it do?! jcmd [PID] help (sorry, JVM
6 users: see jinfo/jmap/jstack)
jstat GC classloader compiler
Mystery solved!
Now “just” fix it
idea 1: eliminate the leak
idea 2: eliminate the cache altogether?
idea 3: delete the feature
idea 4: full-text search engine
So we’re good now… until the next incident
Lessons
“it’s slow” could mean lots of things
“high CPU” could mean lots of things
collecting data is crucial in a crisis
reproducing the issue helps me sleep at night
Other “right tools for the job”
Heap analyzers
Profilers
Constant monitoring & alerting
Dynamic tracing
Learning more
Books
operators are standing by! man jstat man jstack jcmd [PID]
help [COMMAND] etc.
Thank you! Colin Jones @trptcolin 8th Light