Spotting a Suspected Memory Leak

There are several ways to spot a suspected memory leak. Most often the memory leak is spotted after the fact; that is, you get an OutOfMemoryError in your application. This can typically happen in the production environment where debugging possibilities are minimal.

This topic describes a few alternative methods for spotting a suspected memory leak before it leads to an OutOfMemoryError.

When you have spotted a suspected memory leak, you can start drilling down to the cause of the leak by using the Memory Leak Detector plug-in provided with JRockit Mission Control, as described in "Using the Memory Leak Detector".

This topic contains the following subtopics:

• Studying Heap Usage in Verbose Outputs

• Studying Heap Usage in the Management Console

• Studying Heap Usage in a JRockit Flight Recording