The different references views in the heap walker
This screencast is outdated, please watch the more recent version instead.
In the screencast below, I explain the different reference views in the heap walker.
Evaluation of cross-platform installer builders
On stackoverflow, there’s a question regarding the comparison of cross-platform installer builders. This answer is apparently the result of a very thorough evaluation and paints a very favorable picture of install4j.
Finding a memory leak with JProfiler (old)
Object counts in dynamic memory views and the heap walker
Often the question comes up why there are larger object counts in the dynamic memory views than in the heap walker. The simple explanation is that the dynamic memory views show all objects on the heap – even those that are unreferenced, while the heap walker only shows objects that are strongly referenced.
Here, for example, in the “All objects” view, a particular class has an object count of 6741:
In the heap walker, the object count is only 6282:
The difference comes from objects that are not referenced anymore, but that are still on the heap because the garbage collector has not collected them yet. Clicking on the “Run GC” button in JProfiler might collect some, but not all of them, since the garbage collector does not do full collections in modern JVMs. However, when you take a heap snapshot, a full collection is done internally, so you only look at objects that you can actually do something about.
Ideally, we would exclude unreferenced objects from the dynamic memory views too, but this information requires an expensive calculation that can only be performed when taking a heap snapshot.
Signing launchers and installers
Since the release of Vista, code signing has been of growing interest for our users, mainly because a signed installer or launcher produces nicer and less UAC dialogs when it wants to elevate its privileges.
install4j provides a signing hook for all generated windows executables. On step 5 of the Windows Media Wizard, you can specify any external tool with the executable files as parameter. The signing tool will be called with the working directory set to the project file parent directory so you can specify keys and certificates relatively. You can use the $EXECTUABLE variable to refer to the launcher or installer and an $OUTFILE variable if the tool you use requires different in and out files. (more…)
Welcome!
In this blog we’ll show you tips and tricks around JProfiler and install4j. Comments and questions are always welcome. Enjoy!