Azul Systems, Inc., the award-winning leader in Java runtime scalability, today announced the general availability of Zing 5.5, its native Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimized for Linux.
The best JVM for Linux incorporates new performance enhancements, supports virtualization and cloud deployments, and offers the industry's only zero-overhead memory leak detection for live applications.
Key new features in Zing 5.5 include:
- Memory leak detection and usage monitoring for live, in-production Java applications
- Monitor lock optimizations, improving performance and response time consistency, enabling tuned low-latency applications to achieve maximum transaction latencies lower than 100 microseconds
- Full support for Zing on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Support for VMware-based JVM instances
- Improved Linux desktop and "fat client" support (RHEL, Ubuntu, SLES, CentOS) for developers(1)
The new memory leak detection capabilities built into the Zing JVM provide a key advantage for application administrators as well as Java developers. Memory leaks can happen in Java applications for a variety of reasons, including coding and configuration errors, and can lead to application failures due to out of memory conditions. Furthermore, memory leaks will inevitably induce performance problems due to the unnecessary consumption of system resources. Today, memory leaks plague operations teams and can have a serious impact on the business -- including lost revenues due to application downtime, frequent server restarts, un-met service-level agreements and other complications for IT organizations and business owners.
Profiling tools are available to help developers identify potential memory leaks in the development cycle; however in many cases memory leaks only occur in production environments. These existing profiling tools are not able to be used in production environments due to the severe performance penalties caused when used and "Heisenberg" effects. With Zing, developers and application monitoring teams can track, in real time, the growth of memory usage by object type, with zero performance penalties or overhead. Having fine-grained visibility into Java application memory usage allows businesses to identify, and rapidly repair, application instances that suffer from memory leakage. Only Zing delivers these capabilities automatically with no performance penalty, helping deliver improved application availability, uptime, and resiliency, as well as improve overall runtime performance for Java applications.
"With Zing 5.5, we have significantly raised the bar on the capabilities of the Java Virtual Machine," said Scott Sellers, Azul Systems President and CEO. "Never before has real-time, in-production memory leak detection been possible for Java applications. We have answered the call we have heard from our customers to help identify and fix major problems which plague applications in production today and cost businesses real money. In addition, we have implemented significant performance and response-time enhancements targeting application with low-latency requirements. The best JVM for Linux is now even better with Zing 5.5."
"Memory leaks and garbage collection remain a major problem for Java developers and operators," said James Governor, founder analyst at RedMonk. "With its Zing 5.5 release Azul seeks to deliver on the holy grail -- production monitoring with zero performance overhead."
Zing is a 100% Java-compatible native Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimized for the Linux operating system featuring continuous low-latency operation while supporting dozens of CPU cores and hundreds of GBytes of memory. Unlike all other JVMs, Zing makes use of Azul's Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4) technology, implementing a pauseless garbage collection algorithm ensuring that enterprise developers can create and deploy new in-memory applications without risking the problematic performance artifacts caused by traditional Java garbage collectors.
Release 5.5 of the Zing JVM is generally available immediately, and is offered free of charge for Open Source developers. Enterprises can purchase Zing via a subscription pricing model.
To access the no-cost Zing Trial program, please visit http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/trial_program.
Notes: 1: Prior to release 5.5, Zing only supported server distributions of Red Hat, CentOS, SLES, and Ubuntu.
About Azul Systems
Azul Systems delivers high-performance and elastic Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) with unsurpassed scalability, manageability and production-time visibility. Designed and optimized for x86 servers and enterprise-class workloads, Azul's Zing JVM is the only Java runtime that supports highly consistent and pauseless execution for throughput-intensive and QoS-sensitive Java applications. Azul's products enable organizations to dramatically simplify Java deployments with fewer instances, greater response time consistency, and dramatically better operating costs.
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