I’m trying to determine whether or not I have a memory leak in my webapp. I’m using VisualVM and JMeter to load test and watch the heap.
I saved a heap dump to file and downloaded Eclipse Memory Analyzer yesterday…after much frustration with VisualVM, I thought Eclipse would pinpoint the leak, if any, better than VisualVM.
I opened the heap file in Eclipse and ran what they call a Leak Suspects Report. I thought it would point to a particular class in my webapp, but it doesn’t. So I have no clue how to use the info its provided in order to find out where in any particular class of mine the leak suspect is.
Here’s the results of the Leak Suspect Report for one of my heap dump files.
One instance of "org.apache.catalina.session.StandardManager" loaded by "org.apache.catalina.loader.StandardClassLoader @ 0x261bdac0" occupies 16,977,376 (48.54%) bytes. The memory is accumulated in one instance of "java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap$Segment[]" loaded by "". Keywords org.apache.catalina.loader.StandardClassLoader @ 0x261bdac0 org.apache.catalina.session.StandardManager java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap$Segment[]
The rest of the Details in the report are as shown in the attached image. I hope the image can be expanded for a closer look….
I know that Eclipse is supposed to be really good software. This is my last attempt to use something like this to find a memory leak – I just have very, very, limited knowledge in HOW this software can be used for such. Tutorial and help pages describe things as though you should know what to do after a few clicks… I need more help than that.
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Answer
While I don’t have any experience with using Eclipse for finding leaks, I would ask a question first: How sure are you that you have a memory leak? From your question, it doesn’t sound like you are sure you have a leak, but you are testing to see if you do have one. The simplest way to test that would be to start your application, note how much memory it is consuming, have JMeter hit it continuously for 24 hours, and see how much memory it is consuming (probably after executing GC). If your application is consuming a significantly large portion of memory, or has died from an OutOfMemoryError, then you have a memory leak.
If you find that you actually do have a memory leak, then I would first suggest running your application through FindBugs to see if it can find the memory leaks through a quick static analysis. If that doesn’t work, then this article (although it is rather old) might help you understand the results given to you by Eclipse.