Practical Lessons in Memory Analysis
TS-4118

Memory leaks? Sporadic crashes with an OutOfMemoryError? Exhausted permanent generation? High memory footprint? Have you experienced them already? If you're still reading, the answer is probably "yes" and you're probably searching for an easy way to cope with them. This technical, practical session for you!

The session, based on live demos, presents how to analyze some of the most critical and common memory-related problems with the help of the Memory Analyzer tool. For each of the selected issues, the presentation includes

• An introduction to the problem - what is stored in the permanent generation and how it can be exhausted
• Hints for effective analysis - how to extract semantic information for a thread by inspecting its local variables
• A demo showing and explaining the troubleshooting process - how to find the biggest objects, and why they are kept alive
• A suggestion on how the analysis of the problem can be automated and thereby significantly simplified and accelerated

Memory Analyzer is an open-source tool (www.eclipse.org/mat) and was shown at the past two years' JavaOne conferences. One of the new features unique to the tool is that it can work not only with HPROF heap dumps from the Java HotSpot technology-based family of JVM machines but also with system dumps from various IBM JVM machines. So you can apply the new analysis techniques you learn in the session to investigate problems on a wide range of platforms.