Java Mission Control 5.3 Release Notes

This document describes what is new in Java Mission Control (JMC) release 5.3, and identifies incompatibilities and known issues.

JMC is an advanced set of tools that enables efficient and detailed data analysis, and delivers advanced, unobtrusive Java monitoring and management. JMC provides sections for common analysis areas such as code performance, memory and latency.

What's New

This section contains the "What's New" information for JMC.

Area: Install

Synopsis:

Babel Language Packs in Japanese and Simplified Chinese are now included by default in the Java Mission Control that is included in the JDK.

Area: Mission Control Client / Flight Recorder

Synopsis:

The histogram and pie-chart components in Flight Recorder have been reworked to allow a greater number of keys before adding an "Other" key, where the rest of the keys are added. Also, the keys are sorted by size, meaning that now all individual entries outside the Other group are larger than any given entry inside of it. Also, the maximum number of different colors in the pie charts has been changed to 30, and a new hashing algorithm that maps values to colors is now in use. This means that less GDI resources are used, and that different values retain their colors between different recordings.

Area: Mission Control Client / Flight Recorder

Synopsis:

Prior to the 5.3.0 release, the Mission Control JMX Console required the Runtime platform MBean to be available in the MBean server when trying to connect. This occurred because the JMX console attempts to report all times in server time, to make it easier to correlate values captured by Mission Control with other potential logs taken on the machine where the monitored JVM is being run. In the 5.3.0 release, this is no longer required, and Mission Control gracefully degrades to use client time.

Area: Mission Control Client / Console

Synopsis:

The 5.3.0 release has a dedicated tab in the JMX Console for executing Diagnostic Commands (the same commands available through the jcmd command line utility) remotely.

Area: Mission Control Client / Console

Synopsis:

In the 5.2.0 release, historical data did not show a specific attribute unless it was present in the last recording done. This issue has now been fixed.

Area: Mission Control Client / Console

Synopsis:

Fixed a bug related to triggering of time-bound flight recordings. Users can now configure if triggered recordings should be opened automatically or not.

Incompatibilities

This section provides the incompatibility information for JMC.

Area: Mission Control Client / Experimental

Synopsis:

JOverflow requires the latest version of Java FX to work properly, therefore the JOverflow user interface only works properly when running on JDK 8 or later. JOverflow will, however, be able to read hprof dumps generated by older versions of the JVM.

Nature of Incompatibility: behavioral

Known Issues

This section provides information on known issues for JMC.

Area: Install

Synopsis:

If the JDK is installed in a location containing spaces, JMC might either not launch at all, or launch with another JDK than it is bundled with.

The workaround is to either change to a location without spaces, or launch JMC using the following command:



java -XstartOnFirstThread 
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true 
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts -jar
<JDK>/lib/missioncontrol/mc.jar 
-ws cocoa

Area: Install

Synopsis:

To be able to install plug-ins when JMC is run from a JDK that is located in a read-only folder, such as C:/Program Files/ on Windows or /Library/Java on Mac OS X, a patch is needed.

To apply the patch, follow these steps:

  1. Close down Mission Control.
  2. Go to <jdk-home>/lib/missioncontrol/configuration/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator/ folder and edit bundles.info file with administrator privileges (Administrator on Windows, sudo on Mac OS X, as root on Linux), and remove the four lines that start with the following text:
    3. 
org.eclipse.equinox.log.nl_ja
org.eclipse.equinox.log.nl_zh
org.eclipse.equinox.supplement.nl_ja
org.eclipse.equinox.supplement.nl_zh
  3. Restart Mission Control, and install the plug-ins that you want.

Area: Install

Synopsis:

To be able to place custom plug-ins in the Java Mission Control dropins folder, the following patch is needed:

  • Edit the <jdk-home>/lib/missioncontrol/configuration/config.ini, and add the following line:

    eclipse.home.location=$osgi.install.area$

If the JDK is installed in a read-only location, such as C:/Program Files/ on Windows or /Library/Java on Mac OS X, the patch described in the previous release note item is required.

Area: Mission Control Client

Synopsis:

In the MBean Browser in the JMX Console, for MBean Attribute values, the physical quantity and unit of measurement can be changed by using the context menu and the menu item "Interpret Value As".

However, if the attribute value is part of an array, the menu item is missing and it is not possible to change the physical quantity or unit of measurement.