Oracle Java Mission Control is the production time profiling and diagnostics tools suite originally created for the Oracle JRockit JVM. The convergence of Oracle’s HotSpot JVM and the Oracle JRockit JVM resulted in Oracle Java Mission Control’s support for HotSpot (only) from Release 5.0 and onward. This session is an introduction to what Oracle Java Mission Control is and how it can be used to profile Java applications in production systems with almost no overhead. The session also discusses how the HotSpot version of Oracle Java Mission Control differs from the JRockit version and shows some nice new experimental plug-ins available in the 5.0 release of Oracle Java Mission Control.

Large Java applications tend to be memory-hungry. Most profiling tools tell users which data structures consume memory but don’t tell whether that’s good or bad or how to improve the situation. JOverflow, a recent extension to Java Mission Control, analyzes a heap dump automatically, looking for known bad memory usage patterns. It detects empty and underused collections, duplicated strings, unused data fields, and several other issues. What’s more, for many of these problems, the tool can suggest a fix by analyzing application code together with the heap dump and thus save the developer hours of tedious and unrewarding work. Learn more in this session.