Provided Tools

Core and Supportability Tools

Besides the HotSpot VM, Oracle's JDK contains several core and support tools, as presented in the following graphic.

In essence, the Java launcher, the compiler, the debugger and some helper tools for remote communication are the core tools of the JDK. The SAP JVM also provides a low-weight and low-level monitoring tool called jvmmon that comes in two flavors: a command line and a GUI version. In addition to basic VM information like start-up parameters, heap consumption and debugging state, the tool also provides functionality starting traces, triggering garbage collections, and switching a VM into debugging mode.

For more information, see Tools .

SAP JVM Profiler

The SAP JVM comes with its own profiling solution which especially helps developers find performance bottlenecks and reduce the memory footprint. The profiler consists of a back-end and a front-end component.

The back end is integrated into the VM layer and provides low level profiling information over a socket connection or in a file. This information is aggregated and prepared for analysis on the front-end side by a GUI component, the so-called SAP JVM Profiler. The SAP JVM Profiler is built on top of the Eclipse framework and thus can be easily integrated into any Eclipse based environment like the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio. Currently, the SAP JVM Profiler (front-end) is supported on MS Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms (which of course can be used to perform profiling of a Java application running on any platform supported by the SAP JVM).

The advantages of this solution are:

• Profiling-on-Demand

  The SAP JVM can be switched into profiling mode and vice versa at any point in time without restarting the VM or the application server. In addition, no special VM startup parameters are necessary. The profiling-on-demand feature has no impact on the performance if profiling is switched off.

• Profiling and debugging in parallel

  If the SAP JVM is switched into profiling mode, the usual debugging functionality like suspending and resuming threads, inspecting variable states, and enabling breakpoints is still supported. Thus profiling and debugging are not mutually exclusive operations.

• Works reliably with large applications

  Special considerations with respect to memory and CPU consumption are taken into account when analyzing very large application server scenarios.