Heap Analyzer

Heap Analyzer provides a convenient window into the current memory allocation and deallocation behavior of a server.  The visual display of garbage collection behavior and memory allocation can help you spot trends and get more familiar with how your application and JVM behave with your current memory arguments.

A Tip:  You can use this heap analyzer when you are tuning to watch the garbage collection behavior live, or when troubleshooting performance problems that you suspect are heap related.  You can watch garbage collection to see if the pattern is causing significant pauses times during major garbage collections.

Heap Dump

You can generate a heap dump of the selected server by clicking on Heap Dump button. Please note this will make the server unresponsive until the heap dump is written to a file on the server. Generating heap dumps on demand is availble on

- Sun JVM 6 and above.
- Oracle JRockit R28 and above.

Also you can enable automatic heap dumps on supported JVMs when available free memory reaches a certain threshold by setting 2 startup arguments.

e.g. Using startup arguments -Dapplicare.dumpheap.perc=10 -Dapplicare.dumpheap.maxcount=2 will generate heap dumps when the server's available free heap size reaches 10% of the max heap size and will create maximum of 2 heap dumps during the lifetime of the JVM.

You can use the generated heap dumps to detect memory leaks and analyze the objects and their relationships by loading the heap dump in Arcturus Memory Analyzer.

Heap Analyzer – Historical

The Historical Heap Analyzer provides a convenient window into the history of your server’s garbage collection and memory allocation behavior.  You can zoom in and out, choose the range of days from the drop down, and select which server to display.

You can easily spot slow memory leaks with the Heap Analyzer.  Zoom out to show the data for as long as the server has been up, and you can see how each generation is growing over time.  If after major garbage collections the heap doesn’t settle to prior levels, but instead keeps increasing, you may have a memory leak and should monitor it more closely.