If you have deployed a Java application in production, you’ve probably encountered a situation where the application suddenly starts to take up a large amount of CPU. When this happens, application response becomes sluggish and users begin to complain about slow response. Often the solution to this problem is to restart the application and, lo and behold, the problem goes away – only to reappear a few days later.

It is no longer sufficient for IT operations teams to monitor resources like CPU, memory and disk utilization. The success of any IT initiative these days is measured based on user experience. Irrespective of the type of application in question – whether email, Citrix/VDI, SAP, web application – application availability and response time are key measures of user experience. Application outages not only affect users, they can also impact the business.

Java applications deployed in production must be multi-threaded for scalability. Threads can be used for performing different tasks or they could be executing the same task to service different user requests. Often, it is necessary to synchronize between different threads.