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

[Bengt Rutisson]

Hi Kris,

Thanks for looking at this!

Good point regarding CMS. I guess I am a bit concerned about changing 
that since it might start breaking more parsers. I'll send a question 
out on the hotspot-gc-use mailing list to get some feedback.

If we do go for adding this information to CMS we can probably also take 
the chance of adding it to all the young GCs.

I looked at the log sample you referred to. It looks like you were 
logging more details about exactly why a GC was triggered. That is 
probably a good idea, but for now I think we should settle for just the 
text message describing the cause.

Thanks again for looking at this,
Bengt

On 2012-05-07 15:19, Krystal Mok wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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/%7Ebrutisso/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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