CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javadebuggingjakarta-eejvm
Manglu
Manglu

Reputation: 11344

Is there a way to selectively debug a single application (or a few applications) in a JVM?

When i start a JVM in debug mode things naturally slow down.

Is there a way to state that i am interested in only debugging a single application instead of the 15 (making up a number here) applications that run on this JVM.

An approach that facilitates this might make things faster particularly when we already know from the logs and other trace facilities that the likely issue with a single application

Appreciate thoughts and comments

Thanks Manglu

Upvotes: 0

Views: 81

Answers (1)

Vineet Reynolds
Vineet Reynolds

Reputation: 76709

I am going to make a lot of assumptions here, especially as your question is missing a lot of contextual information.

Is there a way to state that i am interested in only debugging a single application instead of the 15 (making up a number here) applications that run on this JVM.

Firstly, I will assume that you are attempting to do this in production. If so, step back and think what could go wrong. You might be putting a single breakpoint, but that will queue up all the requests arriving at that breakpoint, and by doing so you've thrown any SLA requirements out of the window. And, if your application is handling any sensitive data, you must have seen something that you were not supposed to be seeing.

Secondly, even if you were doing this on a shared development or testing environment this is a bad idea. Especially if are unsure of what you are looking for. If you are hunting a synchronization bug, then this is possibly the wrong way to do so; other threads will obviously be sharing data that you are reading and make it less likely to find the culprit.

The best alternative to this is to switch on trace logging in your application. This will, of course be useless, unless you have embedded the appropriate logger calls in your application (especially to trace method arguments and return values). With trace logs at your disposal, you should be able to create an integration or unit test that will reproduce the exact conditions of failure on your local developer installation; this is where you ought to be doing your debugging. Sometimes, even a functional test will suffice.

There is no faster approach in general, as it is simply not applicable to all situations. It is possible for you to establish a selected number of breakpoints in any of the other environments, but it simply isn't worth the trouble, unless you know that only your requests are being intercepted by the debuggee process.

Upvotes: 2

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