Memory Analysis: How to Obtain Java Heap Dump

In this article, we will see how to obtain the Java Heap Dump to troubleshoot memory issues like memory leaks and high usage of memory. There are different options available to obtain the Heap Dump. The options will vary based on the JVM vendors. For this article, I used Oracle JDK8.

Automatically Generate the Heap Dump When Application Throws “OutOfMemoryError”

In this approach, we have to pass the below JVM arguments to get the Heap Dump when the application throws an “OutOfMemoryError“. The JVM generates the Heap Dump file in the specified file path.

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -XX:HeapDumpPath=<path to this heap dump file>

Sometimes we might require Heap Dump in an on-demand basis. For example, during the peak load, an application may become slower and the memory consumption might be more. To troubleshoot the memory consumption, we require Heap Dump. If you have not specified the HeapDumpPath, then the JVM generates the file where the JAVA process is running. The name of the dump file will be something like java_pid.hprof.

Manually Generating a Heap Dump

From JDK6, we are having jmap tool to generate the Heap Dump on demand basis. jmap will dump the Java heap in binary HPROF format to a specified file. The instruction is given below.

jmap -dump:format=b,file=<file_name> <pid>
For example, jmap -dump:format=b,file=heap_dump.hprof 4988

In the above example, the 4988 is the Java process id to get the heap dump. We can obtain the process id by using jps (Java Virtual Machine Process Status Tool).

There is another GUI utility called jconsole. jconsole can connect to local Java process or remote Java process. By using MBeans we can get the heap dump.

We can use the jvisualvm GUI tool to connect to local or remote JAVA processes. Through jvisualvm we can also generate the heap dump.

All the above said tools are part of JDK. Set the JAVA_HOME and PATH environment variables to access the tools.

In the next article, we will see the tools to analyze the heap dumps to detect the memory issues. Until then, stay tuned!!!