ADF Performance Tuning: Manage Your Fetched Data OutOfMemoryError

ADF Performance Tuning: Manage Your Fetched Data

In this blog I want to stress how important it is to manage the data that you fetch and load into your ADF application. I blogged on this subject earlier. It is still underestimated in my opinion. Recently I was involved in troubleshooting the performance in two different ADF projects. They had one thing in common: their servers became frequently unavailable, and they fetched far too many rows from the database. This will likely lead to memory over-consumption, ‘stop the world’ garbage collections that can run far too long, a much slower application, or in the worst case even servers that run into an OutOfMemoryError and become unavailable.

Developing a plan to manage and monitor fetched data during the whole lifetime of your ADF application is an absolute must. Keeping your sessions small is indispensable to your performance success. This blog shows a few examples of what can happen if you do not do that.

Normal JVM Heap and Garbage Collection

First, just or our reference, let’s have a look at how a normal, ‘healthy’ JVM heap and garbage collection should look like (left bottom). The ADF Performance Monitor shows real-time or historic heap usage and garbage collection times. The heap space (purple) over time is like a saw-tooth shaped line – showing a healthy JVM. There are many small and just a few big garbage collections (pink). This is because there are basically two types of garbage collectors. The big garbage collections do not run longer than 5 seconds:

ADF Performance Tuning: Manage Your Fetched Data Normal JVM Garbage Collections

Read more on adfpm.com.