Request for review (S): 7166894 Add gc cause to Full GC logging for all collectors

[Krystal Mok]

Hi Bengt,

FYI, I did something similar to CMS as well, covered by a new flag called
"PrintGCReason" in my build.
It's primitive, compared with your change. I was striving to keep the log
within the brackets just as they were, and instead print extra information
before the opening bracket, on a separate line. The parsing tool we use
tend to ignore the lines it couldn't recognize, so doing it this way
interrupted the tool the least.

An example of the output can be found here [1], page 42. The motivation to
add the extra logging was to track down a mysterious behavior in CMS that
it keep doing back-to-back collections, without much gains, as explained in
[1]. I needed to know why it was triggered. Some of our applications
actually liked the extra logging, so it remained in the code base after the
bug was found.

Anyway, I like the idea of getting more info out of GC logs, in a uniform
way.
Would you mind adding the extra logging to CMS, too?

- Kris

[1]: http://www.slideshare.net/RednaxelaFX/jvm-taobao

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 8:31 PM, Bengt Rutisson <bengt.rutisson at oracle.com>wrote:

>
> Hi all,
>
> Can I get a couple of reviews of this simple change:
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~**brutisso/7166894/webrev/<http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~brutisso/7166894/webrev/>
>
> Background:
> I recently pushed a similar fix for G1 as "7163848: G1: Log GC Cause for a
> GC". That fix adds the GC cause information to all G1 GCs. It was discussed
> if we should do this for all collectors and we came to the conclusion that
> it would be fairly safe to do it for all Full GCs. These log messages
> already contain the text "(System)" or "(System.gc())" when a System.gc()
> happens and PrintGCDetails are enabled. Now they will always contain the
> cause in parenthesis, even when only PrintGC is enabled. Hopefully most
> parsing will work with this.
>
> Thanks,
> Bengt
>
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