gclog improvements

[Tony Printezis]

Rainer,

Hi. See inline.

Rainer Jung wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as we all know, GC logging is still vital for finding a good sizing and
> GC configuration.
>
> Unfortunately the gclog gets overwrittten each time the JVM starts due
> to the way the file gets opened. So in order to keep the files people
> need to add rotation commands to their start scripts. Often this doesn't
> happen and especially when emergency restarts where needed, the old
> gclog is gone.
>
> Any plans for changing this? Or maybe even adding log file rotation to
> the gclog?
>   
We don't have any immediate plans for doing this. Regarding the log file 
getting overwritten, typically customers launch the JVM from a script 
and it's easy to create a unique GC log file name from a script (append 
the start time, pid, or something like that). So, that's an easy issue 
to solve...
> Furthermore: Until now there is no event based model of monitoring the
> GC and Memory data. All methods apart from logging are based on a pull
> model, that retrieves information in regular intervals. The most
> important information does not exist in regular intervals, but instead
> immediately after a GC. It would be nice to have some event based model
> (e.g. like in JVMTI), that allows to track the same data as the gc
> logging, without using the historically motivated gclog file format.
>   
There's a trade-off. I don't like the pull method myself, given that it 
can skip events, give you inconsistent information, etc. But, to get 
consistent information you generally have to do a STW pause, and this is 
too much of an overhead for an application in production. This is why a 
lot of the monitoring has been implemented asynchronously.

Tony
> Thanks for your helpful and transparent comments on the mailing lists.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rainer
>   

-- 
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| Tony Printezis, Staff Engineer    | Sun Microsystems Inc.          |
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