When we need to investigate the cause for a dysfunctional Java application we have a plethora of tools available that on the one hand help us in gathering information, artifacts and statistics and on the other hand help us in processing this information and identifying possible problems.

The following list of tools, snippets, workflows and information about specific artifacts could provide a starting point for analyzing such problems and covers topics like heap-dumps, thread-dumps, heap-histograms, heap-regions, garbage-collection-logs, hotspot-compiler/codecache-logs, debugging native-memory, tools for heap-dump-analysis, JVM unified logging and more..

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I recently stumbled upon a nice framework that allows to convert simple JUnit tests into micro benchmarks named JUnitBenchmarks.

It allows to set basic benchmark options and and to generate charts by adding some simple annotations and a test rule to your tests.

One might argue if it is wise to mix the aspects, testing and benchmarking and I’d agree for sure – nevertheless I think this framework can be handy sometimes so let’s create some benchmarks using JUnit and JUnitBenchmarks..

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