Patty went Alpha

Patty, the project for Java Performance Analysis, has gone to version Alpha today.

I've included a selection mechanism for code coverage and method execution analysis and thread contention analysis is working too. It can be downloaded from sourceforge.

I'm currently working on the Beta version, which needs to include dynamic class instrumentation or de-instrumentation. This has just been tested and is working fine now. There is just a little bit of work on the command sockets that I implemented, basically a TCP stream that communicates between the web-application and the agent library.

Another feature planned for Beta is garbage collection analysis and 'which-object-references-what'. The idea is to show a couple of 'root' classes (objects in the VM, but will be shown as classes in the analyzer), so that you can easily track where memory is being held or where it increases.

Maybe a couple of those analysis dumps can be used in the future to perform some heuristics checking on memory leaks or whatever.

After Patty goes Beta, I want to write up some stuff on performance analysis using Patty, so that the tool can be used much more effectively. Some charting is going to be used as well and some better heuristics on the averaging and trouble points ( potential 'trouble' page for instance, where the problem points are listed).