Eye on Performance: Profiling on the Edge

By Jack Shirazi & Kirk Pepperdine
2005-04-21


What do you do When Your Tools are Too Fat?
Tuning isn't always about speed, sometimes other aspects of the application need fixing. When your application needs tuning, your first course of action is normally to monitor the application with a profiler. But profiling is not always practical -- sometimes for ironic reasons. In this installment of Eye on performance, Jack and Kirk relate their recent experiences with profiling a fat client -- so fat, in fact, that it left no room for a profiler.

We haven't needed to address the issue of tuning an application's memory footprint for a while. Usually, the tuning requirements we see that are related to memory involve reducing garbage collection overhead, ideally by tuning the heap sizes and garbage collection algorithms, and where that fails, reducing object churn using various techniques. But sometimes an application takes up too much memory, regardless of the efficiency of allocation and garbage collection.

Tutorial Pages:
» What do you do When Your Tools are Too Fat?
» A Trip to the Fat Farm
» Back to the Beginning
» Simple But Ugly
» The Final Word
» Resources


First published by IBM developerWorks

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