Locate and analyze heap dumps
Overview
Use this task to locate and analyze heap dumps.
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.
When a memory leak is detected and heap dumps are generated, analyze heap dumps on a problem determination machine and not on the appserver 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
- On the physical appserver where a memory leak is detected, go to the WAS home directory
profile_root\myProfile
- IBM heap dump files are usually named in the following way:
heapdump.<date>..<timestamp><pid>.phd
- Gather all the .phd files and transfer them to your problem determination machine for analysis.
- Many tools are available to analyze heap dumps, including...
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.
Enable automated heap dump generation
Generate heap dumps manually
Diagnose out-of-memory errors and Java heap memory leaks