Locating and analyzing heap dumps
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.
- On the physical appserver where a memory leak is detected, go to the WAS home directory. For example, on the Windows operating system, the directory is:
$WP_PROFILE\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 the problem determination machine for analysis.
- 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 WAS download Web site.
Next steps
When we have a couple of heap dumps, use a number of memory leak problem determination tools to analyze the problem.
Related tasks
Enable automated heap dump generation
Generating heap dumps manually
Diagnose problems using IBM Support Assistant tooling