IBM Heap Analysis Using Eclipse MAT


One of my projects recently went to production were getting memory dumps and sever (IM Websphere Portal 6.1) went down intermittently.

To find the root cause, we tried using IBM heap analyzer. But since the files were huge ,400MB it failed to open in IBM Analyzer tools.

As IBM dump files are in PHD (portable heap dump) format most the tools fail to analyze these dumps.

We tried Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT) , which also doesn't support IBM .phd file by default.

But there is a IBM Diagnostic Tool Framework for Java ,an (API) used to support the building of Java diagnostics tools.

There is plug-in developed using this API, which can be used along with Eclipse MAT.

Once this plug-in is installed, Eclipse MAT can analyze IBM .phd files.

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9 comments:

  1. Thanks for dtfj, made my day.

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  2. Thanks a ton! It helped me to open IBM PHD heapdumps in MAT....

    One thing is that while installing the plugin for eclipse, after selecting achive for DTFJ, I have to un-check the Category option at install page to see the plugin details.

    Cheers

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  3. Thanks ten tons !
    I've lost 2 hours trying to install this plugin until I read your tip to uncheck the Category option.
    It was so frustrating to have a heap dump containing all this crucial information an no tools that can read them ....

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  4. Thank you so much!!

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  5. Yes, thanks so much for the Category note.

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  6. You can open large files in IBM heap analyzer by giving it more memory. I opened 1GB phd file like this:

    java –Xmx6000m –jar ha452.jar

    - Ravi

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  7. thanks for category note....:)

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  8. Thanks a ton for a category note, it helped a lot! i was gluing on the installation options trying to figure out what went wrong with the installations.

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