Ramnivas Laddad has obviously tinkered with a broad variety of performance monitoring techniques for J2EE. While he’s mentioning commercial projects, he also has plenty of practical free or built-in approaches for monitoring performance.

He’s pointed out Sun’s JVMPI, which is the built-in Sun approach to instrumenting an app for pre-1.4 JVMs, but the app has to be started in a special way, and runs dirt slow. I’ve used plenty of commercial products that use this API, and it’s brutal. If you do go down this path, the Eclipsecolorer plugin looks like a nice complementary tool to analyze the output. Using a modified 1.4 JVM or Java 5.0+, JVMTI becomes available as a part of the JVM, and it appears to be quite useful – one more feature to add to the list of useful reasons to upgrade our product to Java 5.0. JFluid in NetBeans gets a mention.

For database analysis, he recommends P6Spy (free) or JDBInsight (not free), and showed a nice example of decorating the JDBC connection to log timing information on all queries without intruding on the persistence code. A similar timing approach can be applied to servlets using a servlet filter.

We get a look at AOP monitoring approaches, not surprising given Ramnivas’ expertise in AOP (he’s presenting 3 other sessions, all on AOP). Some nice example code of an abstract service monitor aspect, along with an implementation. A decent idea, but the question remains of whether to add AspectJ to the massive framework stack already in place in most of my apps.

Finally, we get a look at load generation tools. The usual suspects are here – JMeter (normal web apps), TestMaker (for web services), Grinder (mentioned from the peanut gallery), and LoadRunner (if you’re rich).

The wireless network connectivity in this room is miserable. Unfortunately, a majority of the Agile sessions are in here. There’s a wall jack for ethernet, but who knows if it works – I don’t know when the last time was I used a hard line with my laptop.

Where am I blogging from? No Fluff Just Stuff’s Greater Atlanta Java Software Symposium.