SAS 9.4 JVM gc monitoring

[glenndemunck]

Hello,

I'm monitoring the SAS 9.4 JVM's with the Java VisualVM tool from a remote host. 

Now, I would like to go deeper in detail by enabling garbage monitoring with the Visual GC plugin. Therefore I need to run a jstatd process on server side which is bundled with jdk.

Is it safe to install jdk on the SAS middle tier or will it get in conflict with the SAS Private Java Runtime Environment?

If not safe, is there another way to get visual insight in young gen memory consumption (eden, survivor 0, survivor 1)?

Kind regards,

Glenn

[Galen]

SAS points to it's own private JRE so if you install a JVM elsewhere it should not interfere. I currently have at least 2 other versions of Java that we use for other apps and have not had any issues with SAS apps. This is in linux so if you are using Windows your mileage may vary. It might also interest you to know that I've added jolokia into the midtier with no apparent ill effects but this is not a supported configration but does give me direct access to the JVM without using a separate java.

[SimonDawson]

Rarely do you need to see this level of detail. What is the use case you have for monitoring at this level.

Typically I'd suggest enabling GC logging. The JVM will log the metrics of the memory pools at GC events. This log can be read into a few different applications for visualising the JVM memory pools over time.

[glenndemunck]

Thank you all for your quick replies. We are using a Windows environment but I will try to install and test the jdk on our development environment. 

gc monitoring (and backup) is already enabled and analysed with the GCeasy website.

The reason why I want to monitor the young gen in detail is because our middle tier server has only 4 cpu cores while SAS is recommending 8 cpu cores. Due to that, real time can be greater then user and sys time. Also, our development environment is limited in the amount of ram.

[SimonDawson]

When you write "middle tier server has only 4 cpu cores while SAS is recommending 8 cpu cores. Due to that, real time can be greater then user and sys time" I get the impression this is read from a SAS log?

Can you give some more details on the actual workload you are attempting to tune the performance for?

[glenndemunck]

I'm tuning performance for SAS Financial Management. Our FM database contains 2 cycles (day and month), many formulas (calculated in memory) and duplicated data over different analyses.

Many data loads/extracts are performed. Yesterday, the system performed around 60 uploads to the FM database. Also, many data is exported out of the FM database. This is very resource demanding!

We've already scaled the available memory (125 GB) between different web application servers and tuned the servers together with SAS support. Still we face regular hungs and shutdowns for SASServer3 and SASServer4.

I hope this can give you an idea of the actual workload.You can find the gc logging for SASServer3 in attachment.