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Eclipse Jifa

Monday, March 2, 2020 - 21:33 by Denghui Dong
This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.
Project
Parent Project
Proposal State
Created
Background

The Eclipse Memory Analyser Tooling (MAT) is used widely by Java developers for diagnosis. However, MAT currently is a client application/plugin. Generally, the users need to transfer the dump file from the cloud environment to the local environment, such as the developer's machine, this way is less productive, the situation would become worse if the network between cloud and local is slow, that is, the developer has to wait for a long time of completion of file transferring. Furthermore, some dump files are big and may require the local machine with large enough memory.

To make the MAT easy to use and to overcome the above two problems, we developed a web application that integrated the core parser library of MAT and deployed it to the cloud environment. This way, the developers can directly use the browser to parse their heap dump file without file transferring from cloud to local. There now exists some similar products, such as HeapHero. They are attractive but not open source.

Scope

Eclipse Jifa is a web application based on the Eclipse Memory Analyser Tooling (MAT) that provides HTTP services so that users can view the heap dump files analysis through a browser. Eclipse Jifa is relying on the core library of MAT to analyze the heap dump file. Users can deploy Eclipse Jifa to their cloud environments, and share the same analysis result to different users via browser, and we believe it's a more convenient way to troubleshoot Java heap issues.

Description

Eclipse Jifa uses Vert.x as the main backend framework, and uses Vue 2.0 as the frontend framework.

Features currently supported:

Heap dump Analysis:

  • Overview of the target heap
  • Leak suspects
  • GC root analysis
  • Dominator tree analysis
  • Thread information
  • OQL
  • Other features 
Why Here?

Eclipse Jifa project uses Vert.x as the main framework, and the ability of heap dump analysis is relying on the core library of MAT, which is under the Eclipse Foundation, so contributing Eclipse Jifa here under the same umbrella is the best choice. The open-source is a vital step for Eclipse Jifa to benefit the whole Java community. We hope Eclipse Jifa evolves toward the future together with MAT and delivers excellent user experience of troubleshooting in Java Heap issues to all developers.

Future Work

Add other useful features to Eclipse Jifa, such as GC log analysis、JFR log analysis.

Source Repository Type

There has been a previous attempt to provide web access to Eclipse Memory Analyzer tool so I think there would be a demand for a capability like Eclipse Grace.

The previous attempt used Remote Application Platform (RAP) and although it worked I don't think all the changes were merged into the MAT source:

262603: Create single-sourced version of Memory Analyzer which I think was the basis for the Web Edition of IBM® Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Memory Analyzer.

However I see that IBM Support Assistant Team Server 5.0.2.5 removed that.

Highlights for 5.0.2.5 (Update)



IBM Support Assistant Team Server 5.0.2.5 provides updates and fixes multiple vulnerabilities



The "Memory Analyzer [Web]" tool has been removed beginning with ISA 5.0.2.5. "Memory Analyzer [Report]" and "Memory Analyzer [Desktop]" can be used as an alternative to the Web edition of the tool.