JDK Troubleshooting Guide

Java SE 7 Documentation

The Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit (JDK) allows the development and deployment of a large variety of complex applications. This document contains information and pointers to help you troubleshoot problems you encounter with your applications.

Contents

Quick Tips
Tools
Guides
Articles
Blogs
Forums

Quick Tips

For a few quick tips, consult these tables of typical troubleshooting needs, with corresponding commands, by platform.

• Tips on Solaris OS and Linux
• Tips on Windows

Another resource is the Summary of Tools, Options, and Commands section in the Troubleshooting Guide for HotSpot VM.

For JSSE troubleshooting related to TLS, SSL, or HTTPS connections, consult the Debugging Utilities section of the JSSE Reference Guide.

Back to top

Tools

The following documents are summaries of JDK troubleshooting tools, including links to man pages. Note that these tools are unsupported and experimental in nature, and they might not be available in future JDK versions.

• Tools on Solaris OS and Linux
• Tools on Windows

Back to top

Guides

Two separate troubleshooting guides are available to help you diagnose and solve problems that occur in Java applications.

• Troubleshooting Guide for HotSpot VM
  • For help with problems that occur between the application and the Java HotSpot virtual machine.
  • Describes the troubleshooting tools, how to develop your own tools using the APIs provided with the platform, several suggested troubleshooting procedures, how to submit bug reports, and detailed reference information.
  • Document last updated May 2011
• Troubleshooting Guide for Java SE Desktop Technologies
  • For help with problems that occur with a Java desktop application.
  • Describes common issues which can occur with Java SE desktop technologies, such as Swing, AWT, Java 2D, and so forth, as well as suggestions for troubleshooting these issues.
  • Document last updated May 2011

Back to top

Articles

• Introduction to Java VisualVM - Overview of Java VisualVM, the all-in-one graphical and extensible troubleshooting tool.
• Profiling With VisualVM, Part 1 - How to use the out-of-the-box profiling features of Java VisualVM.
• Profiling With VisualVM, Part 2 - How to use the advanced profiling features of Java VisualVM.
• Troubleshooting Java SE Deployment by Chuk-Munn Lee - Several ways to troubleshoot running Java SE applications, with examples.
• Monitor and diagnose performance in Java SE 6 by Cathy Kegley and Greg Roberts - Take advantage of performance and monitoring enhancements in the Java platform.
• Monitoring and Managing Java SE 6 Platform Applications by Mandy Chung - How to use several monitoring and management tools to troubleshoot common problems with Java SE applications.

Back to top

Blogs

• Planet JDK is an aggregation of JDK developers' blogs.
• Alan Bateman's blog:
  • Demos of monitoring & management and heapViewer
  • Easy starting (attach-on-demand) with JConsole
• Daniel Fuchs' blog: JConsole, JMX, etc.
• Kelly O'Hair's blog: jhat utility, HPROF tool
• Eamonn McManus' blog: JConsole and MBeans
• The NetBeans Profiler blog: Includes NetBeans Profiler and Java VisualVM
• Luis-Miguel Alventosa's blog: Changes to JConsole GUI in Java SE 7
• Jean-Francois Arcand's blog: Using jmap and jhat to troubleshoot memory leak
• Mandy Chung's blog:
  • Java VisualVM Screencast
  • Summary of new features in Java SE 7 for Monitoring, Management, Diagnosability
• Danny Coward's blog: Crash Course: Java SE Monitoring, Management, and Troubleshooting
• Frank Kieviet's blog: "OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space" exception
• Keith McGuigan's blog: Description of DTrace probe providers hotspot and hotspot_jni
• A. Sundararajan's (Sundar) blog:
  • Serviceability Agent, command-line arguments, creating binary heap dumps, using DTrace, JConsole, all troubleshooting tools
  • viewing heap histogram
  • Querying Java heap with OQL (Object Query Language)
  • Perm gen analysis with OQL
  • jrunscript, heapViewer demo, attach-on-demand API

Back to top

Forums

Visit the various forum sites, where you can browse for information and post your own questions. Perhaps someone else has already encountered your problem! Use the Search facility on the forum site to specify your problem area.

This is a very brief list of pointers to the high-level entries into some of these sites.

• OTN Discussion Forums : Java, including categories (among many others) such as:
  • Monitoring, Management, Debugging, and Profiling APIs
  • Java Desktop Applications
  • Java Errors and Error Handling
  • Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
• java.net Forums, including categories (among many others) such as:
  • JDK
  • Java Desktop
  • Performance
  • Java Tools
• Java-Gaming.org: various Java SE game technologies

Back to top

Page last updated: June 2011