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20060526 Friday May 26, 2006

HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError option in 5.0u7 and 1.4.2_12.

5.0 Update 7 was released this week. Among the changes is the backport of the HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError option from Mustang. This VM option tells the HotSpot VM to generate a heap dump when OutOfMemoryError is thrown because the java heap or the permanent generation is full. A heap dump is useful in production systems where you need to diagnose an unexpected failure. Lots of developers sent mail asking to make this option available in the shipping releases. For 1.4.2 it will be available shortly in 1.4.2_12.

So how do you analyze these dumps? The legacy Heap Analysis Tool (HAT) is one option but it's old, provides only limited queries, and it can't import heap dumps generated by 64-bit VMs. A better choice is jhat which fixes many issues with HAT, provides new queries, and most important, it provides a query interface called Object Query Language to write your own queries. Sundar has some great blog entries to introduce OQL and get you started:

The jhat utility is included in Mustang (which you can download from the binaries snapshot site). It will happily munch on dumps produced by 5.0u7 and 1.4.2_12.

Another tool to analyze the heap dump is the YourKit Java Profiler. Anton Katilin and his colleagues in YourKit recently released version 5.5 of the product and this includes an "Import HPROF Snapshot" option to import the heap dump and convert it to the format used by the profiler.

Two other useful things to know are: (i) the heap dumps are platform independent and so you don't need to analyze the dump on the same system that produced it, and (ii) running with -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError does not impact performance - it is simply a flag to indicate that a heap dump should be generated when the first thread throws OutOfMemoryError.

[Update 08/04/06: In the original entry I mentioned a potential issue with the low-pause collector. That turns out not to be a concern.] ( May 26 2006, 04:26:23 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [18]