Jonathan Lalou's blog

Posts Tagged ‘JVisualVM’

Suspecting a thread leak, there is some traffic I’d like to track on my JOnAS server: most of all, the calling IPs, with the methods and parameters sent. Actually, I lack some tools, so I tried to snif the network traffic.
Two softwares may make the job:

• EtterCap
• WireShark

I discarded these solutions for several reasons. First, there are some issues with Windows Seven compatibility. Moreover, traffic on RMI protocol is SSL-encrypted… therefore not easy to read.

At least, I withdrew from this idea to snif, and I decided to intercept calls thanks to loggers.
In order to enable RMI logs, add the following properties to your JVM (to JAVA_OPTS parameters):

• on client side: -Dsun.rmi.client.logCalls=true
• on server side: -Djava.rmi.server.logCalls=true

More details and options are available in Oracle’s documentation: RMI Implementation Logging.

By default, the logs look like this:

FINEST: RMI TCP Connection(5)-10.76.35.25: [10.76.35.25: sun.rmi.transport.DGCImpl[0:0:0, 2]: java.rmi.dgc.Lease dirty(java.rmi.server.ObjID[], long, java.rmi.dgc.Lease)]
2012-05-03 15:35:51,053 : Log$LoggerLog.log : RMI TCP Connection(5)-10.76.35.25: [10.76.35.25: sun.rmi.transport.DGCImpl[0:0:0, 2]: java.rmi.dgc.Lease dirty(java.rmi.server.ObjID[], long, java.rmi.dgc.Lease)]

(Don’t be fool: this is Java logging, but not Log4J!)

By the way, a very interesting result I got is the following: monitoring and profile tools such as JVisualVM or JProfiler “ping” the RMI server, disturbing the measurements. Let’s consider that as “the Heisenberg uncertainty principle” applied to softwares 😉