They say it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, but jhat just about did me in.
I was trying to diagnose a complicated out-of-memory situation in a very busy application server instance. We had run the server with the HeapDumpOnOutOfMemory flag, so we had a full dump of memory, and I was trying to figure out what was going wrong. jhat showed me that there were 185,000 instances of class A, and I knew that each instance of class B has two class A pointers, but jhat said that there were only 203 instances of class B. What gives?
I think that I was running into the problem encountered by this user: jhat just doesn't handle multiple class loaders very well. In my case, one class loader did indeed have 185,000 instances of class A, and a different class loader did indeed have 203 instances of class B, but I was interested in following the reference relationships between all the objects in the first class loader, and jhat wasn't helping.
So, I downloaded and installed the Eclipse Memory Analyzer.
This tool is great!
Apart from one small installation snafu (which, to give them credit, is documented), download and installation was a breeze. And when I pointed it at my heap dump, it read the heap dump, and showed me just what I was expecting: 92,500 instances of class B.
Moreover, with just a couple clicks on 'Immediate Dominators' and 'Merge shortest paths to root', I was able to see the ArrayList instance in a background thread which was holding on to almost all of the 92,500 instances. Wonderful tool!
Unfortunately, the documentation seems rather chaotic, being organized primarily as a webcast and several years of blog posts.
But that's OK: for a tool this good, I'll take the time to read the old blog posts and watch the web cast, because having a solid, reliable, and high-performing memory analysis tool is about as good as it gets, in the programmer's world of development tools.
P.S. Markus, I know that you pointed me at the M.A.T. over two months ago, in a comment to an earlier post of mine. Thanks very much, and I'm just sorry it took me so long to follow up on your suggestion!
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You are welcome :)
ReplyDeleteI thought this blog was about the memory that rocks store within during eclipses and how that is related to galactic consciousness and humanity. But instead, I find this weird stuff.
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