Difference between javacore, thread dump and heap dump in Websphere

Question

A thread dump is a dump of the stacks of all live threads. Thus useful for analysing what an app is up to at some point in time, and if done at intervals handy in diagnosing some kinds of 'execution' problems (e.g. thread deadlock).

A heap dump is a dump of the state of the Java heap memory. Thus useful for analysing what use of memory an app is making at some point in time so handy in diagnosing some memory issues, and if done at intervals handy in diagnosing memory leaks.

This is what they are in 'raw' terms, and could be provided in many ways. In general used to describe dumped files from JVMs and app servers, and in this form they are a low level tool. Useful if for some reason you can't get anything else, but you will find life easier using decent profiling tool to get similar but easier to dissect info.

With respect to WebSphere a javacore file is a thread dump, albeit with a lot of other info such as locks and loaded classes and some limited memory usage info, and a PHD file is a heap dump.

If you want to read a javacore file you can do so by hand, but there is an IBM tool (BM Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer) which makes it simpler. If you want to read a heap dump file you need one of many IBM tools: MDD4J or Heap Analyzer.

JVM head dump is a snapshot of a JVM heap memory in a given time. So its simply a heap representation of JVM. That is the state of the objects.

JVM thread dump is a snapshot of a JVM threads at a given time. So thats what were threads doing at any given time. This is the state of threads. This helps understanding such as locked threads, hanged threads and running threads.

Head dump has more information of java class level information than a thread dump. For example Head dump is good to analyse JVM heap memory issues and OutOfMemoryError errors. JVM head dump is generated automatically when there is something like OutOfMemoryError has taken place. Heap dump can be created manually by killing the process using kill -3 . Generating a heap dump is a intensive computing task, which will probably hang your jvm. so itsn't a methond to use offetenly. Heap can be analysed using tools such as eclipse memory analyser.

Core dump is a os level memory usage of objects. It has more informaiton than a head dump. core dump is not created when we kill a process purposely.

Heap dumps anytime you wish to see what is being held in memory Out-of-memory errors Heap dumps - picture of in memory objects - used for memory analysis Java cores - also known as thread dumps or java dumps, used for viewing the thread activity inside the JVM at a given time. IBM javacores should a lot of additional information besides just the threads and stacks -- used to determine hangs, deadlocks, and reasons for performance degredation System cores

A Thread dump is a dump of all threads's stack traces, i.e. as if each Thread suddenly threw an Exception and printStackTrace'ed that. This is so that you can see what each thread is doing at some specific point, and is for example very good to catch deadlocks.

A heap dump is a "binary dump" of the full memory the JVM is using, and is for example useful if you need to know why you are running out of memory - in the heap dump you could for example see that you have one billion User objects, even though you should only have a thousand, which points to a memory retention problem.