A. Sundararajan's Weblog

Running Java observability tools on "events"

Java serviceability, observability tools such as jstack, jmap, jstat are run asynchronously. i.e., these tools can be "attached" to running Java program at any time (without requiring any VM event). But sometimes, you may want to run these tools on specific "event(s)". For example, you can use -XX:OnError flag to run any of these tools at the time of fatal error exit. For example, you can create heapdump on exit using jmap -F -dump command. What about other events such as gc begin/end, class load/unload, thread start/stop etc?

Mustang (Java SE 6) supports many built-in probes for DTrace. These may be used to dynamically trace JVM and your Java programs. DTrace supports system action that can be used to run arbitrary program from D-script. If you use system action along with JVM built-in probes, then you can run any of the Java serviceability tools such as jstack, jmap based on specific "event(s)". For example, you can write a D-script that triggers java heapdump after 100'th GC event occurs.

int cnt;

BEGIN {
    cnt = 0; /* initialize count */
}

hotspot1274:::gc_begin  
{
   cnt++;
}

hotspot1274:::gc-begin 
 / cnt == 100 / 
{
    /* create java heap dump */
    system("jmap -dump:format=b,file=heap.bin 1274"); 
}

/usr/sbin/dtrace -s test.d -w 

More examples of running Java Serviceability tools on "events":

• run "jstack -l" command on every contended monitor entry/exit probes or on some specific Java method entry/exit.
• run "jmap -dump" when 100'th full GC event occurs (full/partial GC is inferred by first argument to gc-begin probe)
• run "jmap -histo" on GC related probe points (after every 2000'th GC event)
• run "jmap -permstat" on classloader probe points (say at every class unload event)

( Jan 12 2006, 05:35:11 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [1] | | | | |