Archive for category TIBCO
TIBCO Designer with external memory window
During Research for my last blog post I found an interesting feature of the designer. If the designer uses more than one gigabyte of heap memory, the display of the memory usage gets a bit fuzzy.
Obviously somebody at TIBCO forgot to round the value, so it would fit into this small section of the status bar.
Keeping that in mind I found a start parameter which allows you to start the designer with an external window which only displays the current memory load.
As you can see this is much more useful then the default.
To get this you just have to start the designer with the following command:
./designer -memory
I wonder how much more (undocumented) functionality is hidden in the designer.
improve TIBCO Designer tester performance under linux
I’m using the TIBCO designer for quite a while now. Before using it in a debian environment I developed all TIBCO related stuff in Windows XP. Now with the switch to linux there came quite a shift in user experience. One thing that really annoyed me was the slow performance of the designer debugger.
So I started some measurements with a simple test process. The test process creates a simple list of all files (2000 items) in one folder and then iterates over every entry. Here is what I got:
Windows XP: 194sec
Windows XP (minimized): 6sec
Gnome: 470sec
Gnome (minimized): 4sec
All this data was gathered with the same default installation of a TIBCO designer 5.6 with the default java runtime. The configs were all left untouched. So now I tried to find something to improve that behavior. I first concentrated on how to influence the jvm.
After a bit of research in the TIBCO direction a found the following value in the tra-file which allows the user to pass parameters directly to the jvm:
java.extended.properties
With that information I tried several parameters suggested by google. After a few tries I came to this one:
sun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false
What Sun says about it isn’t really clear to me but it helps drastically to improve performance. Back to my original test I came up with the following timings:
Gnome (pmoffscreen=false): 75sec
Gnome (pmoffscreen=false): 5sec
As you can see it actually surpasses the Windows installation. That was a result I didn’t actually expect. Till now I found no drawback to this solution.
Just for the sake of completeness here my full config line of the designer.tra
java.extended.properties=-Xrs -Xmx3072M -Xms1536M -XX:+AggressiveOpts -XX:-UseParallelGC -XX:-UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:MaxPermSize=512M -XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods -Xverify:none -Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false
installing TIBCO TRA 5.6 on a debian 64bit
Recently I got a hardware upgrade so I could finally switch to a 64-bit environment. To fully use that machine I wanted to install TIBCO in 64-bit mode. After starting the installation I got this message:
TIBINS202527: Error: ERROR: You are running a 64-bit product installer on a 32-bit system.
This is not supported.
The Problem was I was running a 64-bit OS with a 64-bit Kernel:
uname -a Linux client1 2.6.28.5 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Feb 17 17:42:33 CET 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
So I tried to find the problem. First I needed some more output what the installer is actually doing. So I used the logging option to get all the debug output.
./TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.bin -console -is:log output
So when you look closer to this log you can see that the command which is running the installer looks like this:
Executing launch script command: “/tmp/isjI8lFYy/bin/java” -cp “”:”TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”TRA.5.6.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”tibrv.8.1.1-simple_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”jre.1.5.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86_64.jar”:”Designer.5.6.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86_64.jar”:”tpcl.5.6.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”hawk.4.8.1-simple_linux24gl23_x86_64.jar”:”/tmp/isjA5jEsB/TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”" -Dtemp.dir=”/tmp” -Dis.jvm.home=”/tmp/isjI8lFYy” -Dis.jvm.temp=”1″ -Dis.media.home=”/tmp/isjA5jEsB/TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar” -Dis.launcher.file=”/home/jens/tmp/TIB_tra-suite_5.6.0_linux24gl23_x86_64/./TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.bin” -Dis.jvm.file=”/tmp/isjI8lFYy/jvm” -Dis.external.home=”/home/jens/tmp/TIB_tra-suite_5.6.0_linux24gl23_x86_64/.” -Xms20m -Xmx128m run -home TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar “-console”
Now that I had the command which is starting the installer I began to trace what this process is doing. To do a strace properly you just have to prepend ‘strace’ and than redirect the error output to a file (cause it is quiet a lot). So after doing this I found something interesting in the log.
[pid 32651] execve(“/bin/uname”, [0xffffffffdf47dc88, "-p"], [/* 1757 vars */]) = 0
As you can see it runs the command ‘uname -p’. This command returns ‘unknown’ for a default debian system. You also have this problem if you are running a self compiled kernel from kernel.org. As for the TIBCO supported systems (SUSE ans redhat) they return something different. After trying the same command on a openSUSE I found that ‘x86_64′ should be the correct string. After I bit of trial and error I found out that the result of this command is written to a file name ‘kernelbits_jens.txt’ in the temp directory.
So here the simple solution to the problem.
You just need to create the arch file manually and make it read-only so the installer can’t overwrite it. Here the command:
echo 'x86_64' > kernelbits_`whoami`.txt
Now the installer worked absolutely fine for me.
I already notified the TIBCO support about the problem. As for now there will be no fix. But I hope they will correct this behavior for future installer.