Re: Very slow JSF Development Mode on tomee 8.x newer than 8.0.6

Thank you for your quick reply, Jonathan.

It is good to know, that normally the Dev mode should work as fast as 
before even with 8.0.15. So it obviously has something to do with my 
environment, configuration and/or code.
And also thank you for the reference to tomitribe. Unfortunately I'm the 
only developer on this project, and it will be difficult to convince my 
customer to an additional support subscription, because he on production 
doesn't have issues ;-) But, ok, that's my problem, and maybe I'll 
consult tomitribe in the future for other projects.
So, I'm afraid, for the near future I'm on my own to solve this problem. 
Therefore any hints to restrict the places where I should take a look 
will be more than welcome.

I'm a senior programmer with 20 years of experience in Java programming 
(SE and JSP). But I'm relative new to JSF/JavaEE/JakartaEE and sometimes 
I have a hard time to understand which component of the whole stack is 
responsible for what.
The project meanwhile has over a 1/4 million lines of code (most of them 
in the back-end, but also the front-end is big enough to not trace 
through every lane if I want to get to the point in this life :-D ).

The application now runs for nearly 2 years on the customers site and is 
very reliable and fast in its daily usage. Apart from occasional updates 
every few month, it will never be restarted or need any manual 
maintenance at all. So I assume the code is not the badest on earth. At 
least because of that I'm able to out-rule things like memory leaks, gc 
issues or bottlenecks (max Heap is never reached, neither half of it, 
even after running for month).

Of course there could be aspects of JSF which I may not have understood 
correctly until now. But because there are so many new things to a JSF 
beginner like me, I'm running out of ideas what this could be. It is 
something that worked well 'til TomEE 8.0.6 (Prod and Dev mode) and 
suddenly don't work anymore on 8.0.12 in Dev mode (but still works great 
in Prod mode). There are only minor versions in-between. So I think 
there were no revolutionary changes anywhere. My hope was (and still 
is), that anybody here on the list might have had a similar problem and 
has solved it, or maybe someone knows about some changes in Dev mode 
which could explain such behaviour (don't know, maybe xml parsing or 
component tree generation has changed, or scope handling of managed 
beans, or whatever could cause some code to be entered far more often 
than before, or some cache/pool was removed or has different 
behaviour... such things). Then it would be far more easy for me to 
track down the real problem.

Anyway, when I get some spare time (currently have some deadlines in 
sight), I'll try to build a small test case. Either I can get a grip on 
the issue myself on doing this, or I can supply it to anyone who might 
want to have a look at it.

cu
Jens



Am 26.10.2023 um 14:01 schrieb Jonathan S. Fisher:
>> newer versions are so incredibly slow in dev mode
> I can assure you that Dev/Prod mode works very very swiftly on 8.0.15
> for sizable applications. For example, I have a giant application
> (thousands of LOC, 50+ jsf views) that has sub-8ms response times
> (minus database time). More than likely they are doing something they
> should not be doing with JSF apis and are causing problems.
>
> I would check the obvious things first with VisualVM: heap size, gc
> frequency, etc. You can also run their profiler and see if you can
> spot anything immediately obvious.
>
> After that, the easiest way to locate the code slowing you down is
> bisection. Cut half the code out, run, and continue cutting until you
> can locate the problematic code. Then after that, isolate a test case
> where flipping a boolean flag triggers the issue and post the results
> here.
>
> I would get ahold of: https://www.tomitribe.com who are literal
> experts in this stuff. They offer professional services to handle
> exactly these situations and can work directly in your codebase to
> help you find and fix the problem.
>
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 5:48 AM Jens Zurawski <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi altogether,
>>
>> I'm new to this list and hope it's the right place to ask this question.
>> If not, and someone know the right place to ask this, please give advise.
>>
>> I'm developing a big JSF Application for a customer. It's a long running
>> project and development and when I started with it, TomEE 8.0.6 was the
>> most recent Version of TomEE. The switch to Jakarta is planned for next
>> year, so I'm still on the 8.x path for the time being and wasn't able to
>> test if this problem still exists in the 9.x branch.
>>
>> The problem:
>> On the customers site I'm with the latest TomEE version 8.0.15 (running
>> on Java 11) and everything works fine, because it is running in
>> production mode. But in my development environment I'm still stuck with
>> 8.0.6, because there I need the development mode
>> (javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE: Development). I need to be able to see
>> changes in facelets without restarting everything everytime, and to get
>> more detailed error messages.
>> My attempts to update my dev TomEE to something newer than 8.0.6 all
>> failed, because all (at least all I've tested so far) newer versions are
>> so incredibly slow in dev mode, that it's unbearable to use the
>> application. Several very looong seconds on every request (even the
>> little AJAX requests in a view) is simply not a practical environment.
>> After switching to Production mode everything works very fast, and all
>> my views have response times of very few ms (even the big ones with max.
>> around 400ms). When switching back to Development mode I have response
>> times of up to 30s on big views. Not with 8.0.6, there even in
>> development mode it's reasonable fast in not getting higher than 1s.
>>
>> My question:
>> What causes this enormous performance degradation? I'm hoping, it is
>> just a configuration which now has another default value or the like. If
>> yes, maybe someone can point me in the right direction of where to find
>> this configuration? If it's not a configuration thing: what can I do to
>> get around this?
>>
>> I haven't tested all Versions of TomEE from 8.0.6 to 8.0.15, so I can't
>> say at what version exactly this behaviour changes. If it helps or is
>> needed, I can make some tests to find the exact version where this
>> happens. Versions I've already tested are: 8.0.12, 8.0.13 and 8.0.15.
>> All of them are very slow in dev mode. If you need more information,
>> I'll try to provide it.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any help
>> cu
>> Jens
>>
>>
>