Reporting Performance Issues in Zend Studio

[rbzend]

In any software product performance issues are usually the most challenging problems. The main reason is that such issues rarely have a clear pattern or a reproduction scenario; on the other hand, they are not regular errors that can be easily tracked in the log. Therefore, troubleshooting performance issues requires special approach. Here we summarized common ways to obtain information that will be instrumental in diagnosing a performance issue.

Whenever you experience performance issues in Zend Studio, such as:

• 100% CPU usage constantly for a long time,
• user interface freezing and being unresponsive,
• any workspace operation that hangs for a long time in progress bar,

follow the steps below to produce Java heap dump at the moment when the problem occurs. Attaching this dump to your report will significantly help us to investigate your case and to provide a fix as soon as possible.


1. Use JMAP. It is included in Java Development Kit (JDK). If you have <JDK>/bin added to your path, it should be enough to execute:

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jmap -dump:live,file=<dump_name>.hprof,format=b <Zend_Studio_pid>

On Windows:

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"%JAVA_HOME%/bin/jmap.exe" -dump:format=b,file=<dump_name>.hprof <Zend_Studio_pid>

It is recommended to repeat this operation in a minute and to save the result to another file.


2. If for any reason JMAP doesn’t work for you (or you don’t have JDK and don’t want to install it), you can start your Zend Studio with the '-consoleLog' argument.
On Windows:

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ZendStudio.exe -consoleLog

This will open a Java console together with Zend Studio user interface. Right after the performance issue occurs in Zend Studio, give explicit focus to the Java console window and press Ctrl+Break. This will output the Java dump to the console. Save console output to a file.
Note, you may need to increase your console buffer size in advance, so that you can see and copy the entire dump output.

On Linux or OSX launch Zend Studio from a terminal window:

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./ZendStudio -consoleLog

OR

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/Applications/Zend Studio.app/Contents/MacOS/ZendStudio -consoleLog

This will display the Java console output in the terminal window. Right after the performance issue occurs in Zend Studio, return to the terminal window and press Ctrl+\. This will output the Java dump to the terminal window. Save the terminal output to a file.

It is recommended to repeat this operation in a minute and to save the result to another file.


3. When reporting a problem please remember to include the following information:

• Steps to reproduce.
• Example file that is causing problem (if possible).
• What was the CPU usage? Constantly high at 100% or idle?
• Was the memory usage growing?
• Attach the ZIP archive generated by Help | Support Tool

Thank you for your cooperation!

Zend Studio Team