Adding more memory to your JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) might be a temporary solution to fixing memory leaks in Java applications, but it for sure won’t fix the root cause of the issue. Instead of crashing once per day it may just crash every other day. “Preventive” restarts are also just another desperate measure to [...]
Some time back I planned to publish a series about java memory problems. It took me longer than originally planned, but here is the second installment. In the first part I talked about the different causes for memory leaks, but memory leaks are by far not the only issue around java memory management. Edit: A [...]
Christopher André is an Enablement Service Consultant at dynaTrace and helps our Customers to maximize their value they get out of dynaTrace. The other day, I went to a customer who was experiencing a problem that happens quite frequently: he had a cache that was constantly growing, leading to OutOfMemory Exceptions. Other problems in the [...]
Most articles about Garbage Collection ignore the fact that the Sun Hotspot JVM is not the only game in town. In fact whenever you have to work with either IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic you will run on a different runtime. While the concept of Garbage Collection is the same, the implementation is not and [...]
Just in time for the upcoming Webinar with The BonTon Stores, were we talk about the challenges in operating complex WebSphere environments, we had another set of prospects running their applications on WebSphere. Francis Cordon, a colleague of mine, shares some of the screenshots resulting from these engagements. In this blog I want to highlight [...]
Memory and Garbage Collection problems are still the most prominent issues in any java application. One of the reasons is that the very nature of Garbage Collection is often misunderstood. This prompted me to write a summary of some of the most frequent and also most obscure memory related issues that I have encountered in [...]
Memory Leaks are painful – especially when they crash your production servers. But – how does one go about analyzing the leak that only happens in the production environment? Here is a story I was told while on-site with one of our clients. I asked: “Chris, tell me about a recent performance problem and how [...]
In my last post I explained what a major Garbage Collection is. While a major Collection certainly has a negative impact on performance it is not the only thing that we need to watch out for. And in case of the CMS we might not always be able to distinguish between major and minor GC. [...]
In a recent post we have shown how the Java Garbage Collection MXBean Counters have changed for the Concurrent Mark-and-Sweep Collector. It now reports all GC runs instead of just major collections. That prompted me to think about what a major GC actually is or what it should be. It is actually quite hard to find [...]
Searching for memory leaks can easily become an adventure – fighting through a jungle of objects and references. When the leak occurs in production time is short and you have to act fast. Like in a treasure hunt, we have to interpret signs, unravel mysteries to finally find the “lost” memory. Memory leaks – together [...]
