Locating and analyzing heap dumps

Use this task to locate and analyze heap dumps.

 

Before you begin

Do not analyze heap dumps on the WAS machine because analysis is very expensive. For analysis, transfer heap dumps to a dedicated problem determination machine.

 

About this task

When a memory leak is detected and heap dumps are generated, you must analyze heap dumps on a problem determination machine and not on the application server because the analysis is very central processing unit (CPU) and disk I/O intensive.

Perform the following procedure to locate the heap dump files.

 

Procedure

  1. On the physical application server where a memory leak is detected, go to the WAS home directory. For example, on the Windows operating system, the directory is:

    profile_root\myProfile
    

  2. IBM heap dump files are usually named in the following way:

    heapdump.<date>..<timestamp><pid>.phd 
    

  3. Gather all the .phd files and transfer them to your problem determination machine for analysis.

  4. Many tools are available to analyze heap dumps that include Rational Application Developer 6.0. WAS serviceability released a technology preview called Memory Dump Diagnostic For Java. We can download this preview from the product download Web site.

 

What to do next

When you have a couple of heap dumps, use a number of memory leak problem determination tools to analyze your problem.

For example, we can download a technology preview from WebSphere Serviceability.


Related tasks
Enabling automated heap dump generation

Generating heap dumps manually