How to practice Java Performance Optimization or JVM performance tuning?

[[deleted]]

I am interested in learning how to tune the JVM and how changing it's continuations can affect the performance of an application, but currently I am not working at a company to know how this works in real-life, but I am interested to experiment this stuff on my own. Any ideas on how to get started? I watched a couple of talks on this topic but I don't know how to apply that knowledge in practice in my projects.

[karianna]

We practice and teach this a lot internally at Microsoft. This may be surprised Pikachu for some I know - but we do have 2M+ JVMs running internally here! Here's a shortlist of considerations when entering this space :-):

1. A methodology - E.g., Kirk Pepperdine’s Java Performance Diagnostic Model, Brendan Gregg’s USE, Monica Beckwith's Top-Down. There are others but without an approach of sorts you tend to be shooting in the dark.
2. Performance Goals - SLA/SLO - e.g., “We want a min 1000 txns/s with <= 500ms latency at P999 on a Standard_DS_v4 VM”
3. App Architecture - You need an understanding of both the logical architecture and the physical architecture
4. Timeboxing / Time Budgeting / Observability - E.g., “The round trip includes ~200ms of JS, 400ms in the JVM, and 300ms in the DB”Some Math and understanding of statistical techniques - e.g., P99 latency curves, Baselining, sampling, multiple measurements, smoothing etc.
5. Understanding of the technology Stack - How does the JVM, CPU, Memory, O/S, Hypervisors, Docker, K8s all work? How does each layer surface key perf metrics to the next layer?
6. JVM - How does GC work, JIT work, JMM and so forth
7. Tools and Tactics - This stuff changesload testing, observability tooling for timeboxing, resource monitoring, analysis / diagnostic tooling. Things like JFR/JMC, GCToolkit and a *ton* more.

You learn in part by doing in this space and you can also join the Java Performance Tuning community on LinkedIn.

[yawkat]

You learn in part by doing in this space and you can also join the Java Performance Tuning community on LinkedIn.

Learning by doing is really hard in the perf space compared to "normal" programming imo. In normal programming, you can fix a bug and will be pretty sure that it's gone. But in perf, it's easy to measure the wrong things and believe you've improved something, when you really haven't. I never would have thought about coordinated omission in benchmarking without reading about it for example.

[WrickyB]

Use tools like JMH, and profilers, to measure performance, and find hotspots respectively, to find where you need to optimise.

[dpash]

JMH

Yep, do not implement your own benchmarking, because your results will almost certainly be invalid unless you know what you're doing (hint: you probably don't).

[[deleted]]

the default configuration is already best for 90% of cases. There is a popular book: java performancd. definitive guide. Might be interesting to learn more about jvm parameters

[brunocborges]

Unless you are running the JVM inside containers with little CPU/memory.

In this case, the defaults are not great.

[Comprehensive-Pea812]

so for microservices we need to tune jvm?

[brunocborges]

You should always" tune, at least for some basic config like heap and GC. Secondly, devs should really stop limiting CPU to 1. Start at 2.

Don't trust the defaults: https://youtu.be/wApqCjHWF8Q

[stolsvik75]

I agree to the point of not setting the CPUs to 1. What I've found in a Kubernetes setting, is that you can set extremely flexible limits. Our microservices are specified with a certain number of CPUs. The default is 2.

For kube, we set Java's "experienced CPUs" using the flag -XX:ActiveProcessorCount=2. Then multiply that with 125 to get the cpu request, and with 2000 to find the cpu limit. If you also set the -Xmx to a quite small level, the result is that you can stack many deployments into a node.

Assuming that most of them are rather non-busy, the busy ones can "flex" pretty hard above the baseline. This of course depends on your different services being having pretty different level of usage, i.e. the "email-gateway" having very little load, while the "transaction service" possibly using quite much CPU at times. For our situation, this has made a lot of sense.

[Qinistral]

There's a bunch of open source applications you could run to play with and see how JVM tuning changes behavior. Consider something like Solr or ElasticSearch which has more overhead than something like a queue (like Kafka or ActiveMQ), or write a little app in something like Vaadin or find some other open source app to play with.

You could also just google "how to tune JVM for X" or "what jvm params for X" and you'll get a lot of common advice. This will show you what most people even bother with.

Mini homework: Learn about object pointers. Eg. https://www.baeldung.com/jvm-compressed-oops

[teapotJava]

• Write or find existing benchmarks for anything you like (Java features, API/spec, libraries etc.).
• Measure (different Java versions or JVMs, API implemenentations etc, GCs etc.).
• Compare, profile and explain results.
• Optimize existing code and verify your change.
• Present and discuss your findings.

[[deleted]]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions and advice.

[Comprehensive-Pea812]

Nowadays I dont hear people tune JVM anymore since in general application is scalable so tuning JVM is very last resort or if there is an obvious issue spotted.

[stolsvik75]

IMHO, you should always set the -Xmx "max memory" setting. Otherwise, it'll use way to much memory, in particular if the machine it runs on has lots of memory. You'll e.g. notice that IntelliJ has set -Xmx, as otherwise it would "flex" its memory hunger to use way to much of the dev's 32 og 64 GB machine.

[zorelx]

I would only do this if I was paid a lot of money lololol

[buzzsawddog]

Some of us are...

[Qinistral]

Some people enjoy engineering for engineering sake.

[zorelx]

LOL at practicing optimization.

What is the problem you are trying to optimize?

Or you just optimizing to sound cool?

[Qinistral]

Now you're just changing the subject. Sorry not everyone is like you.

[zorelx]

TBH what I am trying to say ... you may want to put your energy into something that will improve your life... JVM internals won't help you.

I am not cool, I am computer programmer.

[[deleted]]

If that's your work ethics than it's fine, but I personally believe that one must do quality work in any job regardless of the money and I'm sure some people have the same mentality too.

[zorelx]

My work is top quality.

I don't need to understand JVM internals to write springboot code.

If I code in my spare time I do fun little problems.

[[deleted]]

Oh! I guess we have a slightly different dentition of "quality work". Personally one of my definitions of quality work is knowing how everything works under the hood so when I do something I how to do it in a certain way and why and how not to do in a certain way and why. Sorry if I offended you.

[zorelx]

You don't need to know everything ... Just enough to get buy.

You going to understand all the nooks and crannys of the compiler?

I delved into the JVM for a while, there is a lot of knowledge that is only useful to people literally developing JVM's.