Visualisation of distributed applications for performance debugging

Abstract

This paper presents a method to perform visualisations of the behaviour of distributed applications, for performance analysis and debugging. This method is applied to a Java distributed application. Application level traces are recorded without any modification of the monitored applications nor of the JVMs. Trace recording includes records from the JVM, through the JVMPI, and records from the OS, through the data structure associated to each process. Recorded traces are visualised post mortem, using the interactive Pajé visualisation tool, which can be conveniently specialised to visualise the dynamic behaviour of distributed Java applications. Applying this method to the execution of a book server, we were able to observe a situation where both the computation or the communications could be at the origin of a lack of performances. The observation helped finding the origin of the problem coming in this case from the computation.