Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Eclipse Memory Analyzer considered to be a must have tool

Philip Jacob thinks that the Eclipse Memory Analyzer is a must have tool :

I also had a little incident with a 1.5Gb heap dump yesterday. I wanted to analyze it after one of our app servers coughed it up (right before it crashed hard) to find out what the problem was. I tried jhat, which seemed to require more memory than could possibly fit into my laptop (with 4Gb). I tried Yourkit, which also stalled trying to read this large dump file (actually, Yourkit’s profiler looked pretty cool, so I shall probably revisit that). I even tried firing up jhat on an EC2 box with 15Gb of memory… but that also didn’t work. Finally, I ran across the Eclipse Memory Analyzer. Based on my previous two experiences, I didn’t expect this one to work…. but, holy cow, it did. Within just a few minutes, I had my culprit nailed (big memory leak in XStream 1.2.2) and I was much further along than I was previously.
Thanks Philip for the positive feedback!
I didn't know that EC2 supports big multi core boxes. That is very interesting because the Eclipse Memory Analyzer does take advantage of multiple cores and the available memory on 64 bit operating systems. It will "fly" on one of these boxes.

2 comments:

AnjanBacchuDev said...

Hi there,

"I even tried firing up jhat on an EC2 box with 15Gb of memory… but that also didn’t work"

Cool usage of EC2. I'm finding more and more professionals are using EC2. Did your company compensate you for that ?

thanks for the tip on ECLIPSE MEMORY ANALYZER. The jhat and Yourkit teams, i'm sure will be taking notice.

BR,
~A

Unknown said...

Hi "anjanBacchu",
The Yourkit guys had noticed the Memory Analyzer already some time ago.
The latest release comes with some of "dominator tree" features, that where pioneered by the Eclipse (formerly SAP) Memory Analyzer.

JHat is not competition :]

Regards,
Markus