JRockit Mission Control 1.0 Release Notes

This document contains important details for BEA JRockit Mission Control 1.0. It contains information on the following subjects:

New Features and Enhancements in BEA JRockit R26.4

The main focus on this release has been to stabilize the tools. There are no major features added in this release.

New Features and Enhancements in BEA JRockit R26.3

New Features and Enhancements in BEA JRockit R26.2

New Features and Enhancements in BEA JRockit R26.0

Most Recent Changes

The following has happened with JRockit Mission Control for the different releases:

Changes in the BEA JRockit R26.4 Release

Change Request ID	Description
CR283027	Due to changes in how persistence work, the historical data view displays persistent attribute data only.
CR273969	Previously the Management Console did not enable persistence without being restarted. This problem has now been fixed.
CR274165	Additional issues in the persistence layer have been fixed: Persistence data from several connections are now stored in separate files. If you try to change persistence set while connected, you will be asked to close all your connections, since it is not possible to change persistence set while connected.

Changes in the BEA JRockit R26.3 Release

Change Request ID	Description
CR208105	An option for changing what attribute is being visualized in a velocimeter has been added to the velocimeter popup-menu in the Management Console.
CR250019	A fix to prevent network delays from freezing the GUI by de coupling GUI functionality from network IO calls has been implemented.
CR261212	The known issue CR261718 has now been fixed.
CR262801	Previously, when trying to start the RMP server on a negative, or already occupied port, it could become impossible to re-start it on a valid port. This has now been fixed.

Changes in the BEA JRockit R26.2 Release

Change Request ID	Description
CR241626, CR247386	The context sensitive menus in the graphs and in the instance inspector of the Memory Leak Detector are not always disabled even though they are not applicable for use. This problem has now been fixed.
CR244231	The JRockit Runtime Analyzer (JRA) no longer records too many reference objects.
CR250017	The thread stack dump formats for JMAPI and JLMEXT used to differ. Now the JMAPI method `ThreadSystem#getThreadStackDump()` uses the same code path as the JLMEXT `ThreadMXBean#getThreadStackDump()` method. This eliminates confusion resulting from differing dump formats.
CR253583	JRA recordings will force a garbage collection at the start and end of a recording that can sometimes be too intrusive for the application. To disable the forced garbage collections, start the JRA recording with the option `heapstats=false`. When disabled, some information will be missing from the JRA recording.
CR254819	Now the port can be specified for both the `start_management_server` and the `start_rmp_server` control break handlers. Use: `start_management_server port=<port#>`.
CR254636, CR255962	When sampling allocation intensive applications with the JRA, it can cause an unexpectedly high performance impact. This problem has now been fixed.

Changes in the BEA JRockit R26.0 Release

Change Request ID	Description
CR180667	A list with server names that are discovered through JDP now supplements the server name entry field in the “New Connection” dialog box.
CR206186	Chart views in the JRockit Management Console now remember their attribute subscriptions when the application is shut down and restarted.
CR208294	Previously only public methods were displayed in the method selection dialog for the method profiler. Now all declared methods are visible.
CR210028	Previously native/abstract methods, which cannot be profiled, were displayed in the method selector for the method profiler. Now such method are not displayed.
CR210030	Methods that have already been selected for profiling in the method profiler are greyed out in the Add Method wizard, which means that they cannot be selected.
CR210518	The communications preferences have been changed to include the default update time only. It is also persisted in the settings file.
CR211708, CR238905	The JRockit Runtime Analyzer now requires a license. There are two types of licenses: a free developer license and a license for use in production. For more information, please see: http://dev2dev.bea.com/jrockit/tools.html
CR222700	A check box that makes it possible to block automatically discovered JRockit JVM instances on the network has been added to the Preferences dialog in the JRockit Management Console.
CR228592	Using the Memory Leak Tool could in some instances make the JVM freeze or crash. This has been fixed.
CR231402	Previously, MBeans without any attributes were not shown in the attribute inspector of the JRockit Management Console. Now all MBeans are shown.
CR237249	When starting a Memory Leak Detector session, the Memory Leak Detector first connects to the Management Server to start up the native Memory Leak Server. The client subsequently connects to the Memory Leak Server using an anonymous port. If you have tight firewall demands, you can now specify what listening port the native Memory Leak Server should use by specifying the system property `com.jrockit.memleak.mlsport` on the command line when starting the Memory Leak Detector.
CR238194	The maximum capacity of the data buffer for non-persistent graph data (in the JRockit Management Console) now dynamically matches the free heap space.
CR238196	The attribute inspector in the JRockit Management Console can now show attributes of the type `TabularData`.
CR238205	Synthetic attributes for the live set and the garbage collection pause times have been added in the JRockit Management Console.
CR238769	In the JRockit Management Console persisting the attribute data now works as intended.
CR238808	A log rotation setting is now available through the Persistence tab in the Preferences dialog of JRockit Management Console.
CR240694	The auto y-range setting on attribute subscriptions in the JRockit Management Console now uses the scaled values to determine the range of the graph axis.
CR241880	A refresh button to refresh the attribute data for the MBeans that are shown in the JRockit Management Console has been added.
CR243090	A notification action that writes thread stack dumps to an application alert, a log file, or both, when notified by a trigger (such as high CPU usage) has been added to the JRockit Management Console.
CR243386	A button has been added to the method profiler, in the JRockit Management Console, where you can select and deselect all methods in a class.
CR245479	Previously, the filtering of methods did not work properly in the JRockit Runtime Analyzer (JRA). When the filtering was set, the resulting method table could unexpectedly return blank. Now this has been fixed.
CR246870	The JRA counters for “number of exceptions thrown” and “number of freelist misses” during a recording were incorrect if several consecutive JRA recordings were performed in the same JVM instance. The counters are now reset before each new recording.
CR247601	This release of BEA JRockit includes the Mercury Diagnostics Profiler. This free profiler provides a way for Java/J2EE development teams to profile applications in the development environment. For more information, please see: http://www.mercury.com/us/products/diagnostics

Known Issues

Issue

Description

CR274165

There are some known issues with the persistence layer in the Management Console.

Changing the persistence set while connected, requires that you disconnect from all connected JVM instances and clear the gathered data.
Changing the persistence set while viewing a historical data graph, can result in the persisted data not being properly cleared. If the data was not properly cleared, an exception may be thrown the next time you start collecting new persistent data.

CR241626, CR247386

The context sensitive menus in the graphs and in the instance inspector of the Memory Leak Detector are not always disabled even though they are not applicable for use. If you select such an invalid operation, you will normally receive an error message.

Note:

This issue has been fixed in BEA JRockit R26.2.

CR244231

The JRockit Runtime Analyzer (JRA) records too many reference objects.

JRA recordings sample how many reference objects that are live and have a referent. This number is an upper bound of how many they actually are, i.e. there are not more than the counted number but might, for different garbage collection configurations, be fewer. This is applicable for soft, weak, and phantom references.

Workaround:

There is currently no workaround.

Note:

This issue has been fixed in BEA JRockit R26.2.

CR249007, CR249235

A minor issue concerning leaking memory has been discovered in the JRockit Runtime Analyzer. The leak will only become significant when a large number of recordings are created over time.

Note:

This issue has been fixed in BEA JRockit R26.2.

CR250954

When you right-click on a method in the JRA client, you can choose to Launch external program. The intended functionality (to enable integration with an external source code browser) is currently not enabled.

CR254636, CR255962

When sampling allocation intensive applications with the JRA, it can cause an unexpectedly high performance impact.

Note:

This issue has been fixed in BEA JRockit R26.2.

CR261718

Running the Memory Leak Detector with different locales may corrupt the preferences setting for “Lowest heap usage to report”. This setting can become 100% or greater, showing no types or 0%, showing all types.

Workaround:
Edit the preference setting to any accepted value (e.g. “0.001”, but in your current locale). Or, while the tool is not running, delete the settings file ~/.MemoryLeakDetector/memleak.xml.

Note:

This issue has been fixed in BEA JRockit R26.3.