Visual heap: card table, heap cards, roots, reference chains

[Krystal Mok]

Hi Scott and Ramki,

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Srinivas Ramakrishna <ysr1729 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Scott,
>
> Tony Printezis did a lot of work on GC visualization (GCSpy) with his
> students while he was at Glasgow. There's probably a senior thesis or two
> from Glasgow, supervised by Tony, that may be of interest and probably a
> paper from Tony. As I recall, one of Richard Jones' students picked up that
> work and took it a bit further.  (All this was more than 10-11 years ago or
> even earlier.)
>
> So talking with Tony or Richard Jones or their websites might provide some
> bkgrd... As you say, a good pedagogical tool... And worthwhile for that
> reason.
>
> --Ramki
>
> Which reminds me of two discussion threads from last year [1][2], a GCSpy
rewrite for HotSpot.
I replied to both threads off-list, but I reckon that attempt to rewrite
didn't work.

cc'ing Martin Skurla ("Crazy Java") to see if he actually made any progress
on it.

- Kris

[1]:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/serviceability-dev/2012-March/005465.html
[2]:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/serviceability-dev/2012-March/005516.html


> ysr1729
>
> On Aug 14, 2013, at 9:27, "STIRLING, SCOTT" <ss4766 at att.com> wrote:
>
>  Hi – this question comes out of personal and professional interest in
> the JVM’s garbage collectors and how they work at the most detailed level
> possible. I’m wondering if anyone has developed a visualizer or, short of
> that, even a debug/trace log that could be visualized, which would show a
> deeper, more granular view of the JVM heap’s micro-structures at runtime.*
> ***
>
> ** **
>
> It may sound a little nuts to people who are steeped in it, but, for
> educational and troubleshooting purposes, it would be very interesting to
> be able to visualize the runtime heap in Java at the macro level
> (generations) and at the micro-level (heap words, card table, GC roots and
> chain of references). I’m not expecting something like that would be usable
> in production or for very large heaps (unless it could be saved off in
> files and viewed offline). But I can imagine a view in a tool like VisualVM
> that shows the next level of detail of how the heap is structured at the
> micro-level and how it changes as programs execute and garbage collection
> occurs. Watching it in slow motion and replaying captured traces in offline
> mode would be interesting.****
>
> ** **
>
> I’ve been lurking on the list for a few. I have the OpenJDK jdk8 project
> compiling on Windows and a doxygen/GraphViz config for generating
> documentation and dependency graphs of the C++ code. I’ve been reading up
> on CMS, G1 and the GC papers and patents behind them (as well as the
> Mono/Windows CLR). My interest and experience with testing and tuning JVM
> heaps and GC for large e-comm sites hosted at AT&T has led to the questions
> and interest expressed above. Sorry to interject from out of left field.
> But I highly appreciate any pointers or thoughts on this. And I thank you
> for making and keeping this project open source.****
>
> ** **
>
> Kind regards,****
>
> Scott Stirling****
>
> Principal Technical Architect****
>
> AT&T, Boston ****
>
>
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