BOF: Technical obstacles when building Plumbr

We are a young company developing memory-leak monitoring product called Plumbr. All the members of our development team have 10+ years of experience in developing Java EE projects. But when we founded our own company, we faced various surprises, unexpected problems and totally new experiences. In this session we share the details of the journey of Java EE developers whose daily routines suddenly converted to low-level JVM programming in the unknown land of product development.

We start off by providing background info of the team and the product we develop. Then we review some of the most interesting problems that we have encountered. For each problem we will present some possible solutions and the rationale behind our choice:

• How to track objects’ creation and disposal events? Bytecode instrumentation and the classes that cannot be instrumented. A problem of locking and overhead on objects allocation rate.
• How to conduct graph analysis in a memory scarce environment. The problems of already existing libraries and APIs and why we ended up implementing the basic graph algorithm one more time ourselves.
• User iteration and desktop integration from a Java agent. Who is RMI Reaper and how to decide when you need to commit suicide.

In this talk you get to see the ins and outs of a fresh company and can have a peek under the hood of what kind of technical problems a young company faces in its daily life.