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Locating and analyzing heap dumps

Use this task to locate and analyze heap dumps.

Before you begin

Do not analyze heap dumps on the WebSphere® Application Server 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 WebSphere Application Server 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. WebSphere Application Server serviceability released a technology preview called Memory Dump Diagnostic For Java. You can download this preview from the product download website.

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.

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Last updated: April 20, 2014 08:46 PM CDT
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