hprof format question

Magnus Ihse Bursie magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com
Wed Oct 31 08:41:17 UTC 2018


Hi Simon,

On 2018-10-24 00:26, Simon Roberts wrote:
> Hi all, I'm hoping this is the correct list for a question on the hprof
> file format (1.0.2)?
I don't think it is. You might get better response from 
serviceability-dev at openjdk.java.net.

/Magnus

>
> I found this information:
> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk6/jdk6/jdk/raw-file/tip/src/share/demo/jvmti/hprof/manual.html
>
> and have been working on a small project to read these files. (Yes, I know
> that NetBeans/VisualVM and Eclipse both have such libraries, and a number
> of other tools have been derived from those, but so far as I can tell, they
> all are fundamentally built on the notion of fully decoding everything, and
> creating memory representations of the entire heap. I want to pull out only
> certain pieces of information--specifically object counts by class--from a
> large, ~20Gb, dump file, and those tools just give up the ghost on my
> systems.)
>
> Anyway, my code reads the file pretty well so far, except that the file I
> want to analyze seems to contradict the specifications of the document
> mentioned above. Specifically, after processing about five
> HEAP_DUMP_SEGMENTS with around 1.5 million sub-records in each, I come
> across some ROOT_JNI_LOCAL records. The first 15 follow the format
> specified in the above document (one 8 byte "ID" and two four byte values.)
> But the 16th omits the two four byte records (well, it might simply have
> more, but visual analysis shows that after the 8 byte ID, I have a new
> block tag, and a believable structure.
>
> My current intention is to write a "smart" parser that investigates whether
> processing will succeed or not if the "normal" format is read, or will use
> the alternate format if it realizes that it would result in the next block
> starting with an illegal tag value. Clearly this is not ideal!
>
> Is there any more detailed, newer, better, information? Or anything else I
> should know to pursue this tool (or indeed a simple object frequency by
> classname result) from an hprof 1.0.2 format file?
>
> (And yes, I'm pursuing a putative memory leak :)
>
> Thanks for any input (including "dude, this is the wrong list!")
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>



More information about the code-tools-dev mailing list