JVM options to get full visibility on generation behavior and GC loganalysis tools.

[Rainer Jung]

Alex Aisinzon schrieb:
> I have several questions:
> 
>     * I add the following parameters to get good GC logs:
>        “-XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC
>       -XX:+PrintGCApplicationConcurrentTime
>       -XX:+PrintGCApplicationStoppedTime". I wonder if some additional
>       options are useful. By example, the timestamps only track time
>       since the JVM was started. To correlate an incident with
>       application time stamps, it would be much more useful to have
>       those time stamps use regular dates (2008-06-17 11:58:11,23 by
>       example).

Also useful: -XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution
Timestamps: yes unfortunately until lately there were no absolute 
timestamps available, only relative to JVM start. In 1.6.0_04 the new 
flag -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps has been implemented. See

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6517301
and
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/ReleaseNotes.html (look for the 
bug id).

>     * I have not found a good tool to analyze these logs and have to do
>       that analysis by hand. HPJTune (HP) and GCViewer (TagTraum) are
>       sometimes good enough but does not work when using more refined GC
>       options like Parallel New Garbage Collection.. PrintGCStats is a
>       last one that I have not found very useful either. Are there other
>       tools available that someone could recommend?

The same question form here: if someone did the work of writing a parser 
for those human readable but not really machine usable logs which would 
work with various flag combinations of verbosity, GC algorithms and JVM 
versions that would be really great.

By the way: some things are unfortunately logically missing in the log 
files, like HeapAtGC at the end of a CMS. You can only get the status 
for the memory regions when the next minor GC runs, but not at the end 
of a CMS :(

> In comparison, the IBM JDK provides a single GC output format by using 
> the verbose:gc option. IBM provides some very good tools to analyze 
> those logs.

Regards,

Rainer