Hi,
Jay SenSharma
It’s always best to enable the Garbage collection Logging in our production environment as well because it does not cause any resource overhead or any side effect on weblogic server or an other application server’s performance. GC log helps us in investigating man issues. Apart from issues it helps us to find out if some tuning is required based on the statistics of the Garbage collection.
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Garbage collection logging can be enable and collected in a separate log file by using the following JAVA_OPTIONS:
-Xloggc:D:/gcLogs/GCLogs.log -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps
As soon as you add these JAVA_OPTIONS which are JVM specific (above will work for Sun and Open JDKs fine) the JVM will start generating the garbage collection logging in the GCLog.log file. Now if you will open this file then you can
see something like following:
4.636: [GC [PSYoungGen: 230400K->19135K(268800K)] 230400K->19135K(2058752K), 0.0635710 secs] [Times: user=0.08 sys=0.01, real=0.06 secs] 7.302: [GC [PSYoungGen: 249535K->38396K(268800K)] 249535K->51158K(2058752K), 0.0777300 secs] [Times: user=0.21 sys=0.04, real=0.07 secs] 7.521: [GC [PSYoungGen: 49735K->38388K(268800K)] 62496K->51933K(2058752K), 0.0741680 secs] [Times: user=0.15 sys=0.04, real=0.07 secs] 7.595: [Full GC (System) [PSYoungGen: 38388K->0K(268800K)] [PSOldGen: 13545K->51794K(1789952K)] 51933K->51794K(2058752K) [PSPermGen: 19868K->19868K(39936K)], 0.3066610 secs] [Times: user=0.28 sys=0.02, real=0.31 secs] 9.752: [GC [PSYoungGen: 230400K->26206K(268800K)] 282194K->78000K(2058752K), 0.0728380 secs] [Times: user=0.15 sys=0.00, real=0.08 secs] 11.906: [GC [PSYoungGen: 256606K->38393K(268800K)] 308400K->94759K(2058752K), 0.1058920 secs] [Times: user=0.19 sys=0.00, real=0.10 secs] 13.480: [GC [PSYoungGen: 268793K->38394K(268800K)] 325159K->109054K(2058752K), 0.0762360 secs] [Times: user=0.20 sys=0.03, real=0.08 secs] 18.115: [GC [PSYoungGen: 268794K->38384K(268800K)] 339454K->179238K(2058752K), 0.1351350 secs] [Times: user=0.42 sys=0.10, real=0.14 secs] 20.860: [GC [PSYoungGen: 268784K->38394K(268800K)] 409638K->200343K(2058752K), 0.1063430 secs] [Times: user=0.29 sys=0.03, real=0.11 secs] 22.148: [GC [PSYoungGen: 268794K->38399K(268800K)] 430743K->221395K(2058752K), 0.1173980 secs] [Times: user=0.24 sys=0.02, real=0.12 secs] 23.357: [GC [PSYoungGen: 268799K->26775K(268800K)] 451795K->231618K(2058752K), 0.0714130 secs] [Times: user=0.15 sys=0.03, real=0.08 secs] 24.449: [GC [PSYoungGen: 257175K->29170K(268800K)] 462018K->239909K(2058752K), 0.0312400 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.01, real=0.04 secs]
You can notice something in the above output:
Point-1). [Full GC (System) [PSYoungGen: 38388K->0K(268800K)] It means a Full GC is happening on the complete Heap Area including all the Areas of the Java Heap Space.
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Point-2). [GC [PSYoungGen: 230400K->19135K(268800K)] Indicates some small GCs which keep on happening in the young generation very frequently,This garbage collection cleans the Young Generation short living Objects.
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Point-3). Meaning of the [GC [PSYoungGen: 230400K->19135K(268800K)] line is around 256MB (268800K) is the Young Generation Size, Before Garbage Collection in young generation the heap utilization in Young Generation area was around 255MB (230400K) and after garbage collection it reduced up to 18MB (19135K)
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Point-4). Same thing we can see for Full Garbage collection as well….How effective the Garbage collection was…[Full GC (System) [PSYoungGen: 38388K->0K(268800K)] [PSOldGen: 13545K->51794K(1789952K)] Here it says that around
[(old)1789952K + young (268800K) ] memory space means OldGeneration is consuming 1.75GB space and Young Generation is consuming around 255 MB space So it means total Heap size is around 2GB.
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But analyzing the Garbage collection log like above technique Line by Line is very bad…so here we have an alternative was to analyze the Garbage Collection log in few Seconds to see how much time the Full Garbage collection is taking as an average and other reports…etc.
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Step1). Download the “garbagecat-1.0.0.jar (881 KB) ” tool from the follwing link: http://garbagecat.eclipselabs.org.codespot.com/files/garbagecat-1.0.0.jar
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Step2). Open a command prompt and then make sure that JAVA is set in the Path so that we can use “jar” utility of JDK to run the “garbagecat-1.0.0.jar” tool.
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Step3). Put the “garbagecat-1.0.0.jar” file and the “GCLog.log” file in the same directory. then run the following command:
java -jar garbagecat-1.0.0.jar GCLog.log
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Step4). As soon as ou run the above command you will see that in your current directory following files are created:
garbagecat-1.0.0.jar
GCLog.log
gcdb.lck
gcdb.log
gcdb.properties
report.txt
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Step5). Now open the “report.txt” file to see the Over all report of the Garbage Collection something like following:
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SUMMARY:
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# GC Events: 12
GC Event Types: PARALLEL_SCAVENGE, PARALLEL_SERIAL_OLD
Max Heap Space: 2058752K
Max Heap Occupancy: 462018K
Max Perm Space: 39936K
Max Perm Occupancy: 19868K
Throughput: 95%
Max Pause: 306 ms
Total Pause: 1233 ms
First Timestamp: 4636 ms
Last Timestamp: 24449 ms
========================================
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If you see that the Garbage Collection Max Pause time is very high like more than 5-7 Seconds for a 2 GB heap then you need to worry about it. 😉
NOTE: Garbagecat is a best utility to generate the Garbage Collection Report for Sun JDK and Open JDK for other JDKs you should use other tools for accurate results.
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Thanks
Jay SenSharma
