How do I analyze a .hprof file?

java profiling heap
Nick Stinemates picture Nick Stinemates · Oct 9, 2008 · Viewed 324.2k times · Source

I have a production server running with the following flag: -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError

Last night it generated a java-38942.hprof file when our server encountered a heap error. It turns out that the developers of the system knew of the flag but no way to get any useful information from it.

Any ideas?

Answer

Cowan picture Cowan · Oct 9, 2008

If you want a fairly advanced tool to do some serious poking around, look at the Memory Analyzer project at Eclipse, contributed to them by SAP.

Some of what you can do is mind-blowingly good for finding memory leaks etc -- including running a form of limited SQL (OQL) against the in-memory objects, i.e.

SELECT toString(firstName) FROM com.yourcompany.somepackage.User

Totally brilliant.

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