Java Mission Control 5.4 Release Notes

This document describes What is New in Java Mission Control (JMC) release 5.4, and lists notable bug fixes 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.

Contents

What's New

The following new features and changes are included in JMC 5.4.

  • New IDE launcher integration plug-in.
  • New JFR plug-in for Java FX.
  • Line numbers can now be shown in aggregated stack traces in JFR.
  • Byte Code Index can now be shown in aggregated stack traces in JFR.
  • Entering Array arguments for MBean operations has been improved.
  • JMX Console dump JFR trigger action no longer requires a default recording to work. Any recording will do.
  • Ctrl-mouse wheel now zooms to the mouse pointer in the thread graph in JFR.

Bug Fixes

Area: Mission Control Client

Synopsis: Dropins not working when jmc is launched with Eclipse launcher.

Prior to the 5.4.0 release, the dropins folder (JDK_HOME/lib/missioncontrol/dropins) did not work for installing new plugins if JMC was started using the JMC launcher (which is normally the case). The issue is now fixed.

Area: Mission Control Client

Synopsis: Installing plug-ins in shared install does not work.

Installing plug-ins in a shared install of JMC (e.g. under Program Files on Windows) could fail silently. The issue is now fixed.

Area: Mission Control Client

Synopsis: Error dialog pops up after attempting to install plug-ins on Mac.

Sometimes installing plug-ins in JMC on Mac could result in a dialog stating:



'Animation start' has encountered a problem.
An internal error has occurred.

The issue is now fixed.

Known Issues

Area: Release Engineering

Synopsis: jmc does not start with the correct JVM if included in a jdk with spaces in path

On Mac OS X platform, if the JDK is installed in a location containing spaces, it is not possible to launch Java Mission Control (JMC) using the jmc launcher in bin, or the Java Mission Control app. The workaround is to either change to a location without spaces, or launch JMC using the following:



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

Area: Mission Control Client

Synopsis: Changes in preferences (network connections) take effect only after restart.

Changing the proxy settings on the Preferences page (General - Network Connections), doesn't take effect until after restarting JMC. See https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=393243.

Area: Mission Control Client/Flight Recorder

Synopsis: Sometimes empty graphs occur on I/O Socket Read/Write tabs.

A boundary problem in the rendering of bar charts can, in rare cases cause the I/O Socket Read/Write graphs be blank, even though there are I/O events.

Area: Mission Control Client

Synopsis: Clipping problems with large stack traces.

Some native OS tree table components can have a problem rendering very deep trees. Workaround is to do cmd-a cmd-c and look at the stack trace in a text editor.

Area: Mission Control Client/JVM Browser

Synopsis: Not possible to determine state of jmx agent.

The JVM Browser now includes a new menu item: "Control the Remote JMX Agent". When you chose it, a dialog appears with two radio buttons: "start / stop remote jmx agent", where you will have to decide whether or not you want to start or stop the jmx agent. Ultimately the initial state would be automatically detected, and no radio buttons needed. There is however no API in the JVM that can be used to determine whether or not the jmx agent is started or not.

Area: Mission Control Client/Console

Synopsis: Can not click to select unit in trigger condition.

When content proposal shows a selection of units that can be used for a text field, it is not possible to select a unit using the mouse. As soon as the user clicks in the proposal chooser, the text field loses focus and a listener is activated that tries to commit the text value to the model. As a part of that process the proposal chooser is closed.

The workaround is to use the arrow keys to select a unit and press enter to select the unit.

Area: Mission Control Client

Synopsis: Display goes blank/flickers when mouse moved on Thread Dumps tab.

This seems to happen whenever a text control is higher than 8196 pixels high.

Area: Mission Control Client/Experimental plug-ins

Synopsis: Cannot create local DTrace Recordings on Solaris if there's not enough memory left.

If JMC is running on Solaris (as plug-ins in Eclipse), and there is not enough memory left, creating a dtrace recording against a local JVM will not work. This will happen if Eclipse is run with JDK version before JDK 8 b104.

Note: DTrace is an experimental feature in JMC.