Performance Monitoring

This section describes the VolanoChat Server real-time status application. * The VolanoChat real-time status application tracks a variety of performance statistics to help you manage your VolanoChat server under heavy loads. Statistics gathered include the memory usage, thread count, number of chat connections, rooms, private chat rooms, messages received, messages sent, and total number of messages.

Starting the Status Application

Before running the VolanoChat real-time status application, you must set the status.password property in the server properties.txt file. Once the status password is set, you can obtain real-time reports by running the status application from your VolanoChat Server directory. Enter the following command (use Java command as appropriate) for your JVM:


  java COM.volano.Status host port password interval
variable description
host is the domain name of the host running your VolanoChat Server
port is the port number at which your VolanoChat Server accepts status connections. This port number is set by the status.port Server property.
password is the password for status connections. This password is set by the status.password Server property.
interval is the interval, in seconds, at which you want the Server's status reported

Status Application Output

The format of the status reports are (all on one line):

DD/MM/YY HH:MM:SS used available %used threads connections rooms private received sent total

report item description
used is the number of kilobytes used in the Java Virtual Machine's heap storage
available is the total number of kilobytes available in the Java Virtual Machine's heap storage
%used is the percentage of heap memory used (i.e., %used = (used / available) * 100)
threads is the number of active threads in the Java Virtual Machine
connections is the number of active chat connections
rooms is the number of chat rooms
private is the number of private chat sessions
received is the average number of messages received per second over the interval
sent is the average number of messages sent per second over the interval
total is the average total number of messages sent and received per second over the interval

A sample status report is:

  02/21/97 18:47:35 175KB 381KB 46% 44 12 6 0 1 5 6

Capturing Output to a File

On Windows and Unix, you can capture error messages to a file with the following command (where java should be replaced with the name of your Java Virtual Machine).

  java COM.volano.Status >> status.txt 

The ">>" tells the Server to append all error messages to the file status.txt. You can then use a utility program such as tail -f to view the file as it is being updated.

* This is an MS-DOS or Unix redirection symbol and can be used with any program which runs on these platforms, not just VolanoChat.