Quick Java Heap Analysis

I had a need to do some quick profiling of a Java application. I didn't want to spend alot of time (or money) setting up a profiler and my app to run within that profiler's environment. But it turns out that SUN's Java 6 distribution ships with some very handy tools that you can use to do what I wanted without setting up anything special - didn't even have to pass in any special set of -D system property definitions.

First, run your application and get it into a state that you want to analyze. Then perform the following steps:

1. Run "jps" to determine the process ID (aka pid) of your Java application. BTW: this is a cool nugget in and of itself. I've been so used to doing "ps -elf | grep java" or "pgrep java" to find my running Java applications that I never bothered looking for a simpler way. "jps" dumps the pid and the simple name of the Java main class - and most of the time this is all you are looking for. But you can also get the fully qualified main class names and the argument lists - use "jps -help" to see the usage syntax. This is a very helpful tool all by itself.


2. Run "jmap -dump:format=b,file=dump.dat <pid>" where <pid> is your Java applications's pid that you found in the previous step. This will dump information about your Java VM's memory in the file "dump.dat" and will be used by jhat in the next step.


3. Run "jhat -J-Xmx512m dump.dat" to start the Java heap analysis tool (jhat). This will start an HTTP listener on port 7000. The -J option lets me configure the jhat VM, which is needed if you have a large dump to analyze.


4. Point a browser to http://localhost:7000 and begin browsing around.

This jhat tool let's you examine the objects and classes currently found within your VM. It's nothing glorious and certainly not as well featured as many of the other commercial and open-source profilers out there. But, it comes with the JDK, and requires absolutely no setup. It can't get much easier to perform a quick heap analysis than this.

Credit goes to Frank Kieviet, whose blog brought my attention to these tools.