Monthly Archives: August 2013

Spring Book – Chapter 17 – Messaging with Spring

Messaging is a method of communication between software components or applications. Messaging enables distributed communication that is “loosely coupled” (decoupled). A component sends a message to a destination, and the recipient can retrieve the message from the destination. The important thing here is that, the sender and the receiver do not have to be available at the same time in order to communicate with each other.

Java Message Service (JMS) defines a standard way for Java applications to create and exchange messages through a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM).

Messaging is one of the key components in any modern day application development. In this Chapter we will initially cover messaging concepts in some detail. Later on we will cover JMS and its components in detail. We will then deep-dive into the support provided by Spring in applying messaging to your application. We will then go through the transaction support by JMS and again what Spring has to offer in this space. Finally, the Chapter concludes with a discussion of Spring’s support in achieving global transactions in your application.

Messaging in General

Messaging systems are used to build highly reliable, scalable, and flexible distributed applications. A messaging system allows separate, uncoupled applications to reliably do the communication asynchronously. The messaging system architecture generally replaces the client/server model with a peer-to-peer relationship between individual components, where each peer can send and receive messages to and from other peers.

Messaging systems provide a host of powerful advantages over other, more conventional distributed computing models. Primarily, they encourage “loose coupling” between message consumers and message producers. Other advantages of messaging systems include high scalability, easy integration with other heterogeneous networks, and reliability due to lack of a single point of failure.

Messaging is another integration style as detailed in Chapter 6.  Systems exchange messages within each other using a component known  as a broker, which provides the necessary guarantee and services while using messaging along with capability of interfacing with other interfaces like JMS driver, AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), Stomp (Simple Text Oriented Message Protocol), XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) etc. These interfaces are often referred to as Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) and are available as commercial and open source products in the market. Figure 18-1 shows a diagram of a MOM-based messaging system.

fig18-01

Figure 18-1. Messaging using MOM

Message-oriented middleware (MOM) is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple operating systems and network protocols, such as the following:

  • Simple (or Streaming) Text Orientated Messaging Protocol (STOMP) provides an interoperable wire format so that STOMP clients can communicate with any STOMP message broker to provide easy and widespread messaging interoperability among many languages, platforms and brokers.
  • Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware. It’s a binary, application layer protocol, designed to efficiently support a wide variety of messaging applications and communication patterns.
  • Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open-standard communications protocol for message-oriented middleware based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). The protocol was originally named Jabber, and was developed by the Jabber open-source community.

Advantages of Messaging

The main advantages of using messaging as an integration technology in your application can be summarized as below:

  • Platform Independence – one of the biggest advantages which messaging integration style brings onto table is communication and integration of heterogeneous platforms. Using messaging it is possible to integrate applications and systems which are implemented in completely different platforms. Even though we have many ways of integrating heterogeneous platforms like RPC-based, common database etc., only messaging truly provides a decoupled way of interaction between such disparate systems.
  • Network location Independence -messaging also provides capability of connections applications and systems in completely different networks with ease.
  • Architecture Flexibility and Agility – this very important advantage of messaging is achieved through level of abstraction and decoupling capabilities. Because of decoupled components, these can be replaced with a more capable component at a later stage with ease giving application flexibility and agility to changing business scenarios. In a typical messaging environment, the various components like producers, consumers and client components doesn’t need to know which programming language or platform these are written for, where they are located and even the protocol they used to communicate. These details are all abstracted away, making it more flexible from the architecture point of view.
  • Reduce system bottleneck – asynchronous nature of messaging is the key in avoiding system bottlenecks. Since messaging architecture gives your application asynchronous nature, your receivers need not keep up with the rate of requests coming in reducing the system bottlenecks. In a synchronous environment, your application would have resulted in system bottlenecks if the number of requests exceeds a particular amount which the consumer can consume and process.

Using traditional RPC-based technologies, there is a synchronous communication between a client and a server component. Also, communication between many to many can over a period of time turn into a mesh of one to one communication between various components as shown in Figure 18-2 below. This meshing can be troublesome from the application maintainability point of view.

Figure 18-2. Traditional RPC-based application component interaction

Figure 18-2. Traditional RPC-based application component interaction

On the other hand using a messaging style of integration allows adding a mediation layer between one or more consumers and one or more producers. This result in clear communication between various components which has a clear interface with other components interacts, making it easy to swap the various components according to application requirement. Figure 18-3 shows message-based component interaction.

Figure 18-3. Using messaging-based application component interaction

Figure 18-3. Using messaging-based application component interaction

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Web Service Framework Comparison – 2013 – Part II

As promised here is my Part II of the blog. You can find Part I of the blog in here. Also my chapter on Spring WS in my Spring book in here.

The Blog is still under construction but i would like to publish it and then keep on updating with more content. Apologies for incomplete blog post.

Apache CXF

The project is a merger between two open source projects namely Celtix developed by IONA technologies and XFire developed by Codehaus. As you would have already figure why the name CXF – Celtix XFire. Rather than me plagiarizing, I would suggest reading the Wikipedia for more details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_CXF.

Some of the advantages associated with Apache CXF is as follows:-

  • Good cohesive support for the Spring Framework.
  • Good OSGi support (How much this is a valid constraint for the evaluation is questionable, i agree).
  • Good support for more strong web service functionalities like WS-Security, WS-Policy etc. to name a few.
  • It also has a compliant JAX-RS implementation allowing it to expose web service as REST and SOAP based.
  • It also has W3C compliant SOAP/JMS implementation if they are required.
  • Much easier to use and implement.
  • Less verbose when it generates basic classes for WS/WS-Client from the WSDL.
  • More “standards based” API’s. The API’s are slim and trim with good performance and ease of use.
  • Considered more “embeddable” as opposed to other WS frameworks, especially with the Spring Framework.
  • CXF provides support for code first and contract first development, and provides ability to plug-in various flexible binding mechanisms.
  • The front end programming API’s is spectated from the core code making it really flexible.

Some of the disadvantages associated with Apache CXF is as follows:-

  • Doesn’t support Orchestration and WS transactions yet (I really don’t know how relevant this is, i plagiarized it from Ankur Kumar blog, refer reference section of this blog post. As he is well-versed with WS, i think i should believe him. Might be Daniel Kulp will help me with this.)
  • WSDL 2.0 support is not yet there.
  • Again, CXF is very good with SOAP, so for web services based on REST, due to its very good support for SOAP, CXF brings in added weight and complexity (I am expecting Daniel Kulp to help on this as well)

Apache Axis2

As explained earlier is a completely re-written version of the famous Apache Axis SOAP stack. While doing so it has to some extend looked upon various lessons learnt and corrected it. Some of the advantages of using Axis2 are as detailed below:-

  • Good support for more strong web service functionalities like WS-Security, WS-Policy etc. to name a few.
  • Good integration support for binding frameworks like XMLBeans, making it suitable for creating web services having complex schema definitions.
  • Somewhat better integration support with the Spring Framework. More details can be found at http://axis.apache.org/axis2/java/core/docs/spring.html.
  • Considering performance aspects, it performs a bit faster compared to Apache Axis2 due to use of proprietary API’s.
  • Supports bothe Contract-First and Contract-Last approach, which gives good flexibility and choice to the users. This is key to some extend.

Some of the disadvantages attributed to Axis2 are as detailed below:-

  • Lack of cohesive support with JAX-WS. the support is detailed in the following URL: http://axis.apache.org/axis2/java/core/docs/jaxws-guide.html.
  • Again good cohesive support between Axis2 and Spring Framework as opposed to other WS frameworks.
  • Good amount of classes, a bit hard to understand and difficult to refactor in case if it is required.
  • Churns out more proprietary API’s and you as a developer would have to handle these.
  • Quick turnaround with fixes and releases. You could read Part I of this blog which compared these aspects in detail.
  • Slowly Apache is phasing out Axis2 in favour of Apache CXF (Please dont quote me on this, but this is slowly happening)
  • It’s a web application by its own with all the services deployed in WEB-INF/services folder as AAR (Axis 2 Archives). This structure as a whole can be problematic while deploying, maintaining, upgrading, versioning and testing to a greater extend.

Spring WS

Some of the advantages associated with Spring WS is as follows:-

  • Full support of the Spring programming model and this can be a very good advantage to take this framework on. The Spring Framework is leading the Java web framework race, now almost single handedly and this advantage is key according to me.
  • Clean API’s (same as above because Spring having clean API’s has influenced this to a larger extend)
  • Clean mapping of the incoming SOAP messages to the methods
  • If your web application framework is based on Spring MVC, Spring WS gives easy and clean mixing between WS endpoints and Spring MVC’s controllers. Also coding of endpoints is as easy as coding a new controller in Spring MVC.
  • Easy unit/integration testing capabilities.
  • Support for different XML marshallers.
  • No generated code/deployment descriptors.

Some of the disadvantages associated with Spring WS is as follows:-

  • Supports only Contract-First approach, which could result in lack of flexibility to the users.
  • Most of WS-* support might be questionable. By the way how much of WS-* things we use?

Technologies grow faster and with open community development, issues identified gets fixed quickly. Having said that, there is an article which i would like to share; http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jws19/index.html; which rates Apache CXF more as compared with Apache Axis2 in security aspects. Many issues identified would have got corrected over the period of 3 years, but its worth noting these.

Although my comparison is not that well structured, i found a blog released on the same day as i was typing mine, which details the set of criteria which should be used for evaluating the web service frameworks. If i have to do this extensive comparison, it would take me at least 3 months. Since i don’t have much time at this point, i still don’t want the reader not to see these evaluation criteria, which is well structured and though through:

http://naveenbalani.com/index.php/2010/05/evaluating-web-service-frameworks/

Things which I think (Purely my own)

  • For almost 80% of the projects the capabilities required can be covered in a good way by using either Apache CXF or Apache Axis2. If already you application is based on Spring Framework, I would suggest using Apache CXF along with Spring Framework OR using Spring WS with use of CXF as the web service engine.
  • Spring WS similar to the Spring programming model has good and clean API’s, making it easy for developers (juniors) to code web services in Spring WS fast and easy. If you would like more standards, i think Apache CXF is a good choice over Apache Axis2. Again Apache Axis2 is slowly getting itself eaten up by Apache CXF. Fro an enterprise application point of view longevity and community support id required and here CXF scores well compared to Axis2.

Spring WS > Apache CXF > Apache Axis2

I cannot really say that Spring WS is above Apache CXF, because they are very very good fraewmorks. According to your application requirement, i would suggest using either Spring WS or Apache CXF.

Finally to finish off the blog, i would again like to share a picture, which gives Google Search Trends for these Web Service Frameworks in the year 2013 – WorldWide. How much it gives an edge to Apache CXF is questionable, nevertheless gives an indication as to what people are looking for in Google with regards to these frameworks and which is more active.

GoogleTrendsWSFrameworks

There is a beautiful page maintained in Apache which compares the various WS frameworks as a whole. The page is edit last in the year 2011, but I felt the page is a good share in my blog (note Spring WS is missing in the list because it is not an Apache project).

http://wiki.apache.org/ws/StackComparison

References

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Web Service Framework Comparison – 2013 – Part I

I have done a similar blog post earlier, namely Spring Integration Vs. Apache Camel, surprisingly it received good review from the community and i thought i will do a similar exercise on one of the other big topic of comparison these days, Web Services Framework.

I have a Spring Book Chapter in Spring Web Service, which you can find in my Spring Book, Chapter 16.

Again, i am not biased on selecting any of the frameworks. The view expressed are solely mine. To be honest i don’t have a great deal of experience in the field of web services, but again as part of one of my projects i came into a scenario where i have to select on these frameworks and i thoughts to share the details that i collected. Again, i don’t want to give a verdict, as i don’t consider myself capable of doing so. Just so that anyone in situation can go through the blog and get details, compile it, present it to the team and based on it take the final decision for your project.

Also i have taken three web service framework, which i felt was top in the industry as of now. If anyone disagrees, please feel free to comment on the blog and looking at its relevance i will correct it, as i don’t want this blog to a misleading one for the community as a whole.

Apache CXF

Apache CXF is an open source services framework. CXF helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs, like JAX-WS and JAX-RS. These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI.

– http://cxf.apache.org

Axis2

Apache Axis2™ is a Web Services / SOAP / WSDL engine, the successor to the widely used Apache Axis SOAP stack. There are two implementations of the Apache Axis2 Web services engine – Apache Axis2/Java and Apache Axis2/C.

– http://axis.apache.org

Spring WS

Spring Web Services is a product of the Spring community focused on creating document-driven Web services. Spring Web Services aims to facilitate contract-first SOAP service development, allowing for the creation of flexible web services using one of the many ways to manipulate XML payloads.

– http://static.springsource.org/spring-ws/sites/2.0

Comparison from ohloh.net for the two projects:-

WebServiceComparison1

WebServiceComparison2

I think the comparison figure that is shown above doesn’t convey the exact comparison that we expect. Just by looking the figure above, Spring WS scores very low and can be taken out immediately from comparison. BUT that’s not the case IMHO. Lets get dirty and try the various comparison in some detail.

This is something new in this post, job trends on these technologies from indeed.com is as shown below. What it shows? It might not be relevant, but it shows what companies are looking at hiring when it comes to these technologies. It might be misleading but it shows that what companies are thinking and which technology is popular in various organization’s mind.

JobTrend

JobTrend1

The above comparison figure on the various web service framework’s job opening’s doesnt really give any technical comparison between them but is a good to know fact. It also gives some trends followed by various companies.

Note:- Spring Web Service project was added by me in ohloh.net, solely for comparison perspective. The code location was already added in the main Spring Framework project. If anyone feels that this is not the right way, please feel free to send me a comment and i will do the needful. Also, if it is violating any of the legal terms doing so, please don’t sue me.. :). If given proper directions, i will correct it as early as possible.

In Part II of the post, i will be covering the comparison of these frameworks in detail, looking at various aspects and trying to get some conclusion as to which framework has an edge over the other and what is the reason for me to think so.

Let me have my short and sweet weekend and by next week you can read my blog post, which will be more useful and informative.

 

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Resetting Admin Console Password in Weblogic

Is it that you installed Weblogic application server and because of your short memory forgot the password that you used for logging in as admin? I am sure many would have. In Google when i searched also i could find people who had the same issue.

In this blog post i am not going to write anything more, rather i would like you all to point to a beautiful online tool created Vladimir Dyuzhev in the below URL:

 

http://recover-weblogic-password.appspot.com/

 

Its so cool that people take time out to write something for themselves and share it with the community for the benefit of all. This is awesome.

Also it would be good if you can Look into author’s FAQ (Right sidebar of the page), as it states there is no security issue in having such an online tool and it will not breach any security. Because of this, i would like to share this tool to the entire community.

I too faced the same issue recently and i did use this tool for getting my admin password. Mind you, the application server was not a production one, rather it was a local installation in my desktop.

 

Thanks Vladimir Dyuzhev. Appreciate it.

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Spring and Hibernate Example

The beauty of Spring is that it can integrates well with most of the prevailing popular technologies, and in the case of ORM, it integrates well with Hibernate.

I have written a Spring Book and in Chapter 8 i explain Spring’s Data Access capabilities in detail. There is separate topics written on ORM integration and this specific heading namely “Spring and Hibernate” is dedicated for explaining this beautiful integration between two open-source framework.

Please visit Page 9 in Chapter 8 of my Spring Book for more details on the same.

This section of the chapter examines the means by which Spring can be integrated with Hibernate. I assume that the reader is somewhat familiar with Hibernate and by reading this far familiar with Spring Framework as well to some extend.

ORM is a piece of software/product for the representation and conversion of data between the database and the object-oriented programming language. Hibernate is a powerful technology for persisting data and is a clear winner in the ORM race as of now. However it hasn’t become a standard. It takes much of the database related boiler-plate code from the developers, thereby asking the developers to concentrate on the core business logic of the application and not with the error-prone SQL syntax. It also enables application to access data from any database in a platform-independent manner.

One of the problems with using Hibernate is that the client Application that accesses the database using Hibernate Framework has to depend on the Hibernate APIs. These objects will continue to get scattered across the code throughout the Application. Above all, the application code has to manually maintain and manage these objects. Here comes Spring to the rescue with its IoC container capable of configuring these objects using Spring configurations.

 

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What is rt.jar? What constitutes JDK and JRE?

For a beginner, this will be one of the question which they might have. For an expert even though this is well known jar file in Java, very few will know as to what it is and why it is so important. This blog post is a very short post, just giving some details of what rt.jar is and what constitutes Java as a whole (JDK/JRE).

rt.jar contains all the RunTime classes that comprise the Java SE platform’s core API’s. In simple terms this is the jar which contains classes like java.lag.String, java.io package etc. The source code for these API’s can be found in src.zip file in JAVA_HOME.

Since all the classes in the rt.jar are known to the JVM, these classes tend to be left alone with various checks that JVM does while loading these classes onto it. This is also done for various performance reasons. These jars are loaded by primodial class loaders and that’s the reason these classes avoid the basic security checks which the JVM does for other jars/classes.

The base files and folders in the JDK/JRE is shown in the below figure.

JDK-JREFiles

Image Courtesy – docs.oracle.com

For more details on all the various files and directories comprising JDK and JRE, i would suggest going through the official Oracle documentation as follows:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/windows/jdkfiles.html

As pointed out by one of the reader, since the above link is no longer maintained, the below link which details JDK 1.7 is given:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/tools/windows/jdkfiles.html

 

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Garbage Collection – Java Performance Tuning

While i was reading the latest Java Magazine (July-August 2013), i came across a topic namely, “Adaptive Size Policy” with regards to one of the important components in JVM, garbage collection.

I researched on this topic and this blog post is my attempt to explain this in some details with good references for follow up reading.

Before going on to explain “Adaptive Size Policy”, i need to cover certain basics in the field of garbage collection. I will be covering this blog under such sub-topic for easy understanding and reading.

JVM Heap in General

JVM heap, aka heap, is divided into two regions, called as generation, namely

  • Young Generation
  • Old Generation

The Young generation region is further divided into sub-regions, namely

  • Eden
  • Survivor Space 1
  • Survivor Space 2

This is how it works when an object is created:

  • The object will be created in Eden and it could be destroyed there itself
  • If the Eden region is full, the object is pushed to Survivor Space 1
  • If the Survivor space 1 is full, the object is pushed to Survivor Space 2
  • The objects which are not destroyed in Survivor Space 2 are retired to the Old Generation region of the heap

To tweak the heap size commonly used Java options as -Xms and -Xmx. You can get a complete list of -X commands that you can use with respect to Java Heap Size, please run the command java -X. Below screenshot shows the various commends that can be used.

Java -X commands which can be used for Heap Management
Java -X commands which can be used for Heap Management

Java Garbage Collection in General

Most of the programming language including Java has a very important feature of automatic memory management, also known as “Garbage Collection”. Objects created during execution of a program, at various stages becomes unreachable and are considered as “garbage”. Over a period of time for managing memory, these garbage is removed and the space is regained for useful staff. Java has very good garbage collection and over a period of time, with some very good engineers working on it, using various algorithms, have made significant progress and enhancement this all important feature.

The core component in the Java SE platform is JVM (Java Virtual Machine). In the case of Oracle JVM, its called as “Oracle’s Hotspot JVM”. We will discuss garbage collection with respect to this Hotspot JVM as GC (Garbage Collection) methodologies differ according to the JVM being used.

Garbage collection is one of the biggest benefit which the Java language provides. If used in a proper manner it will be really beneficial, but if not used cautiously, it can doom your application big time. Some of the considerations with respect to garbage collection which have to be kept in mind are the following:

  • JVM Pause – The time taken by the JVM to do the GC during which the JVM pauses
  • Throughput – The time interval between successive GC

Our goal as an application tuner is to minimize the JVM pause and maximize throughput. There is no hard and fast rule that you can reply on to do this. It comes with experience and the environment in which your JVM/application functions, which will interfere to a greater extend.

There are various GC modes which are possible to be configured using various JVM commend line options. Having said that, these JVM options configured is dependent on various components like the hardware you are running, JVM version etc. to name a few. The default GC mode also depends on the JVM vendor. The various GC modes with respect to Hotspot JVM is as detailed below:-

Serial GC

As the name suggests it is executed by a single thread and requires a complete stop on all the processes carried out by JVM during the execution. The JVM switch for this is specified as -XX:+UseSerialGC

Parallel Scavenge

As the name suggests the collection is parallelized between multiple threads. This also requires the entire JVM operations to be stopped/deferred but during to parallelism, the time required will be reduced to a greater extend. The JVM switch for this is specified as -XX:+UseParallelGC. In modern days due to availability of multicore/multiprocessor this has become more of a norm.

Parallel Old GC

Incremental advancement over Parallel GC mode. I don’t want to go into much more detail, as this post is a head start for beginners to get a primer on GC. The JVM switch for this is specified as -XX:+UseParallelOldGC

Adaptive Size Policy

A special mode of Parallel Scavange in which the JVM automatically adapts and adjust the various heap sizes and does the GC. Might sound a big scary as you might feel that there isn’t much control in overall space allocation by JVM. But IMHO, the java engineers have put lots of effort and experience building this and they shouldn’t be taken as complete wrong and we should have fairly good confidence in using this switch as well. The JVM switch for this is specified as -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy

Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS)

Its a low pause collector and the way by which it handles this by using different algorithms for collecting the various heap regions. The JVM switch for this is specified as -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC

CMS incremental mode

In this the CMS competes with the CPU cores to perform the GC. The GC thread and application thread works in parallel and in modern day hardware IMHO this is good option. The JVM switch for this is specified as -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode

G1 Garbage Collector

New generation collection mode introduced as part of JVM 1.6. For more details you can find the link to a blog by Alexey Ragozin. The JVM switch for this is specified as -XX:+UseG1GC

Adaptive Size Policy in Detail

Now coming to the main point in this blog, “Adaptive Size Policy”. Since now you have a good idea of the various basics with respect to JVM Heap and JVM GC options, I would be able to explain this concept much easily.

By defining adaptive size policy in a JVM, you are commanding the JVM to adapt itself to the surrounding environment by dynamically re-sizing the heap and its regions so as to attain certain goals already set as follows:

  • Minimize the footprint created by the heap
  • Adhere to the maximum garbage collection JVM pause as desired
  • Adhere to the minimum garbage collection throughput goal as desired

As detailed in the earlier section, to enable this set the JVM switch as follows:

-XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy

To set the desired policy values, you can use the following switches:

-XX:MxGCPauseMillis=nnn – Tells the VM that maximum of nnn milliseconds on less is desired

-XX:GCTimeRatio=nnn – The ratio of GC time to application time

Ideally if you specify the -Xms value to be equal to -Xmx, adaptive size policy is nullified. In cases this might be desirable, but in most of the cases believing the engineers behind this algorithm will surely make your application perform faster and in no case IMHO this should be done whereby a feature is nullified as good amount of research and experience is employed while designing and developing it.

Note:-

Its good to not that options beginning with -X are non-standard, means, need not be supported by all the VM vendors in the market and these are subject to change according to vendor discretion. The options beginning with -XX are non-stable and similar to -X, these are subject to change without notice.

GURU’s with regards to this topic – References

Good Primer – http://blog.ragozin.info/2011/12/garbage-collection-in-hotspot-jvm.html

In simple words – http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=java&seqNum=27

Java Hotspot VM options – http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/vmoptions-jsp-140102.html

Complete list of -XX options for Java JVM – http://stas-blogspot.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/most-complete-list-of-xx-options-for.html

That’s all folks. Thanks once again for all the reference materials, which helped to me learn these concepts and write this blog.

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