19.6. Monitoring performance

Optimization is not much use without monitoring and access to performance numbers. Hibernate provides a full range of figures about its internal operations. Statistics in Hibernate are available per SessionFactory.

19.6.1. Monitoring a SessionFactory

You can access SessionFactory metrics in two ways. Your first option is to call sessionFactory.getStatistics() and read or display the Statistics yourself.

Hibernate can also use JMX to publish metrics if you enable the StatisticsService MBean. You may enable a single MBean for all your SessionFactory or one per factory. See the following code for minimalistic configuration examples:

// MBean service registration for a specific SessionFactory
Hashtable tb = new Hashtable();
tb.put("type", "statistics");
tb.put("sessionFactory", "myFinancialApp");
ObjectName on = new ObjectName("hibernate", tb); // MBean object name

StatisticsService stats = new StatisticsService(); // MBean implementation
stats.setSessionFactory(sessionFactory); // Bind the stats to a SessionFactory
server.registerMBean(stats, on); // Register the Mbean on the server
// MBean service registration for all SessionFactory's
Hashtable tb = new Hashtable();
tb.put("type", "statistics");
tb.put("sessionFactory", "all");
ObjectName on = new ObjectName("hibernate", tb); // MBean object name

StatisticsService stats = new StatisticsService(); // MBean implementation
server.registerMBean(stats, on); // Register the MBean on the server

TODO: This doesn't make sense: In the first case, we retrieve and use the MBean directly. In the second one, we must give the JNDI name in which the session factory is held before using it. Use hibernateStatsBean.setSessionFactoryJNDIName("my/JNDI/Name")

You can (de)activate the monitoring for a SessionFactory

  • at configuration time, set hibernate.generate_statistics to false

  • at runtime: sf.getStatistics().setStatisticsEnabled(true) or hibernateStatsBean.setStatisticsEnabled(true)

Statistics can be reset programmatically using the clear() method. A summary can be sent to a logger (info level) using the logSummary() method.

19.6.2. Metrics

Hibernate provides a number of metrics, from very basic to the specialized information only relevant in certain scenarios. All available counters are described in the Statistics interface API, in three categories:

  • Metrics related to the general Session usage, such as number of open sessions, retrieved JDBC connections, etc.

  • Metrics related to he entities, collections, queries, and caches as a whole (aka global metrics),

  • Detailed metrics related to a particular entity, collection, query or cache region.

For example, you can check the cache hit, miss, and put ratio of entities, collections and queries, and the average time a query needs. Beware that the number of milliseconds is subject to approximation in Java. Hibernate is tied to the JVM precision, on some platforms this might even only be accurate to 10 seconds.

Simple getters are used to access the global metrics (i.e. not tied to a particular entity, collection, cache region, etc.). You can access the metrics of a particular entity, collection or cache region through its name, and through its HQL or SQL representation for queries. Please refer to the Statistics, EntityStatistics, CollectionStatistics, SecondLevelCacheStatistics, and QueryStatistics API Javadoc for more information. The following code shows a simple example:

Statistics stats = HibernateUtil.sessionFactory.getStatistics();

double queryCacheHitCount  = stats.getQueryCacheHitCount();
double queryCacheMissCount = stats.getQueryCacheMissCount();
double queryCacheHitRatio =
  queryCacheHitCount / (queryCacheHitCount + queryCacheMissCount);

log.info("Query Hit ratio:" + queryCacheHitRatio);

EntityStatistics entityStats =
  stats.getEntityStatistics( Cat.class.getName() );
long changes =
        entityStats.getInsertCount()
        + entityStats.getUpdateCount()
        + entityStats.getDeleteCount();
log.info(Cat.class.getName() + " changed " + changes + "times"  );

To work on all entities, collections, queries and region caches, you can retrieve the list of names of entities, collections, queries and region caches with the following methods: getQueries(), getEntityNames(), getCollectionRoleNames(), and getSecondLevelCacheRegionNames().