Clearing the Java heap space to improve performance

KNIME Analytics Platform
1

Where's the code that creates the status bar and "Show heap status" bar in the bottom border?

I'd like to understand it to add more controls.

2

That's nothing KNIME-specific, but belongs to the underlying Eclipse platform. The “Trash” button probably does nothing else than call a System.gc();

Clearing the Java heap space to improve performance

With all due respect, but I have great doubts that you'll achieve any performance gains by manually triggering a GC (probably more the opposite). The heap display is for debugging purposes. Trust the engineers: If your JVM needs memory, it'll take it. When there's memory to release, the GC will do it when necessary. If you run out of memory, you'll do so eventually anyways -- no matter if you “tidy” manually or not.

3

Thank you very much for the timely and concentrated response.

If I could trouble you with one more thought: how would you improve speed? Due to the volume of data being processed I would elect to use a distributed computing approach, but my superiors have selected KNIME.

4

Good evening,

I'm probably not a great expert concerning big data and distribution.

But maybe starting from the very basics: Do you already have a clear understanding where your bottlenecks are? Is it actually memory-related, or is it processing power, IO, ...?

KNIME and distributed approaches don't have to exclude themselves -- see e.g. here: https://www.knime.com/knime-big-data-extensions-0

Best,
Philipp