This week we released Chronon 1.5. The big feature of this release is the inclusion of 'Server Mode' in the Chronon Recorder.

What is the Server Mode?

The Server Mode is designed to allow the Chronon Recorder to be controlled through the Chronon Recording Server.

It includes features such as:

• Ability to do dynamic start/stop of the recorder in a running program
  The recorder can stay dormant in your program unless explicitly started from the Recording Server UI.
• Ability to record long running programs.
• Ability to split a recording based at a time interval or when the physical size of the recording gets too large.
• Ability to dynamically modify the set of classes that are being recorded in a running program.
  Thus, you can start recording with say include=com.package1.** and later decide to recorder com.package2.**.  All this without the need to stop the program.

Future directions

With the addition of the Server mode in the recorder, we now have 2 distinct modes for the Recorder: 

1. Developer Mode
2. Server Mode

The developer mode is the one you are probably familiar with as that is what is used when you record using the Chronon Eclipse plugin. It records the entire program from beginning to end and is meant for short running programs, as is common in development scenarios.

Moving forward we will probably have each of these 2 modes optimized for their specific use cases. There are a lot of optimizations that we want to put in the Recorder that will add a bit of overheard to the instrumentation time. While this is acceptable for long running server programs, it is not as useful if you are going to run your program for only a few minutes from within eclipse.

A good analogy is the server and client jvms. While the client jvm is optimized for quick startup and does less optimization, the server jvm is meant for long running programs and does a lot more aggressive optimization.

We will keep you posted on the specifics of how we proceed with putting optimizations/features in each of these modes of the Chronon Recorder.