IBM HeapAnalyzer

If you get OutOfMemory exception or your server is performing slow and the JVM Memory utilization is going up continously then you might want to take a look at JVM Memory Heap. THis is two step process first you should generate heap dump on your server and then analyze what all objects are there on the heap and if there is a memory leak

The IBM HeapAnalyzer tool lets you analyze the heap dump generated by WebSphere Application Server. This tool is shipped with IBM Support Assistant or you can download it from the Alpha works site. I tried using the HeapAnalyzer that is part of the ISA 4.1 but it kept crashing so i had to download it from Alpha Works Site

I wanted to learn how to use Heap Analyzer Tool to identify Memory Leaks, so i started by creating a MemoryLeakServlet and then i used the JMeter tool to generate load on this server. The load test ran for few minutes and then WAS started throwing OutOfMemory exception. Please note that when the WAS server throws OutOfMemory exception it generates Heap Dump.

Since i am using standalone version of Heap ANalyzer i had to start using the command line like this


The HeapANalyzer tool is very memory intensive so you should not run it on production and run it on a machine which has lot of memory.

Once the tool is opend select the .hpd file by clicking on Open and then selecting the heap dump file like this


The tool will take few minutes to analyze the heap data and then it will generate view like this.




As you can see the Reference Tree section is showing the objects on the heap in tree format. Now if you click on Subponea Leak Suspect button you will see that there is one suspected memory leak so select the button and it will take you the object which is suspected to have the memory leak.



As you can see it is showing the ArrayList object which is inside MemoryLeakServlet as memory leak.