Remote Java debugging on different continents

Question

When attaching a debugger in an IDE (IntelliJ or Eclipse) to a JVM running on another continent (London, New York), the lag is unbearable. I waited more than 10 minutes for IntelliJ to fill my stack frames and fill objects before giving up when I hit a breakpoint. (note: during this process, jav did not see a fully populated debug state!) This makes remote debugging using the IDE impossible!

I know a jdb tool that does not experience such latency issues. I suppose because it is more finely tuned for specific data retrieval from the virtual machine, rather than populating every frame in the stack and all available values.

Does anyone know if there is an intermediate site? I find jdb cumbersome to use - I would like to see a user interface (built on top of jdb) that did not experience latency issues in the IDE. Does anyone know if such an application exists?

Does anyone know of other methods for debugging remote virtual machines running thousands of kilometers?

Answer 1

Buy something like linode or another VPS that works on the specified continent (or if you have friends with spare bandwidth living on the continent).

Install X-Forwarding and run your IDE on connecting VPS to it from your home using ssh.

We hope that the graphical lag of X is more tolerable (hint: yes) than about the debugging delay that you talked about.

Answer 2

It is probably more related to the bandwidth of your connection than to the debugger.

Answer 3

I used the IntelliJ 7.0.5 IDE and the debugging was terrible. Since then I upgraded to IntelliJ 9, and the lag seems to be tolerable.

I think IntelliJ 7.0.5 was doing something “interesting” when talking to a remote virtual machine.

Answer 4

Your problem is not unsolvable: I am doing the opposite (New York to London) using Eclipse. It’s not scary, but it doesn’t seem unbearable anywhere, and nothing like that you describe.

I would ask three questions:
1) Are you absolutely attached to IntelliJ?
2) Do you have copies of dependent jars locally?
3) How is your bandwidth overall? How does remote desktop work? How about editing a file through a network share?

Answer 5

With very easy testing of a fairly large project (almost 100 subprojects, ping times ~ 200-300 ms), Netbeans seems to be doing ok compared to Eclipse.

You can complete the step, and it takes a few seconds to update and attach in <1 min.

Of course, it’s annoying that you can’t use Eclipse, but it’s a graphical interface and how is it better than simple JDB.