java - Analyze GC logs for Sun Hotspots, JVM 6

Question

I'm trying to analyze GC behaviour for our application (running in Tomcat, under Sun's Hotspots, JVM 1.6).

So far I've Instructed the JVM to emit GC logs to a separate file using...

-Xloggc:gc.log 
-XX:+PrintGCApplicationStoppedTime 
-XX:+PrintGCApplicationConcurrentTime 
-XX:+PrintGC 
-XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps 
-XX:+PrintGCDetails

...and used jstat to output logs using...

jstat -gc -t 29045 5s > jstat.gc

I am seeing interesting information, but haven't found a tool to help me analyze/visualize these logs. I was pointed to GCViewer by this question, but it only parses a few log lines from gc.log and then crashes with an exception. Is there a better or more up-to-date tool for parsing these specific logs, for the specific JVM I'm using?

Answer 1

gcviewer hasn't been updated in a number of years, so it's hit or miss - some gc files will work fine, others get exceptions.

IBM's gc log parser works acceptably, http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/pmat/faq

Sun has something called GCPortal, but it requires:

• install into a web app server
• install of awk and perl
• install of a RDBMS with a JDBC driver and configuration
• and the real killer, third-party graph/chart software that used to be free and now isn't. Amazing.

gchisto has died, there's no longer anything in the project.

HPJmeter doesn't understand IBM gc files.