Get/Analyze the IBM JDK Heap DUMP

Was recently trying to do something that's suppose to be really simple but again was not... Looks like another case of set of engineers having strong "I did it my way.." syndrome. + The great IBM tools which are really strong but its easier to find your kid in a local fest than finding the help for IBM products. After looking through several web pages and sites (some of them even gave wrong/outdated information) I was able to do it. At one point I felt like I am getting clue from one page just to get redirected to another :), anyways enough of my frustration and required steps are given below:

1.     Get the DUMP for IBM JDK

Use the -Xdump argument on the command line or in the Eclipse run configuration. You can have multiple -Xdump stanzas on the command line and also multiple dump types driven by one or multiple events. Thus, -Xdump:heap+java:events=vmstart+vmstop would create a dump agent that would drive both heap and Java™ dump production when either a vmstart or vmstop event was encountered.

a)  Execute the program with the argument -Xdump:heap:events=vmstop

b)  Once the program starts stop/close  it. On Eclipse/Windows Console you will see something like this:

JVMDUMP006I Processing dump event "vmstop", detail "#00000000" - please wait.

JVMDUMP032I JVM requested Heap dump using 'C:\Program Files\MyProduct\heapdump.20110630.133125.776.0001.phd' in response to an event

JVMDUMP010I Heap dump written to C:\Program Files\MyProduct\heapdump.20110630.133125.776.0001.phd

JVMDUMP013I Processed dump event "vmstop", detail "#00000000".

2.     Install the Heap dump analysis tool

a)      If you don't already have the Support Assistant Workbench, download and install the IBM Support Assistant Workbench.

b)      From the Support Assistant Workbench, click Update > Find New... > Tools Add-ons.

c)       In the window that pops up, select the tools that you would like to install and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation. When the installation is completed, the Workbench will restart.

List of tools that you can install are given below, but I couldn’t find any so I installed the one which looked familiar. Important one that I think will do the job is HeapAnalyzer

§ IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Dump Analyzer
§ IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer (GCMV)
§ IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Memory Analyzer
§ IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Health Center
§ IBM Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer for Java (TMDA)
§ Multicore Software Development Kit for Java (MSDK)
§ HeapAnalyzer
§ IBM Pattern Modeling and Analysis Tool for Java Garbage Collector (PMAT)
§ Performance Analysis Tool for Java

3.     Starting Heap Analyzer

ISA Version 4:

1. Select Analyze Problem from the Welcome tab on the home page.
2. Open the Tools tab.
3. Select HeapAnalyzer
4. Once started Open the dump file created in first step

Another tool that’s mentioned on the site is Memory Dump Diagnostic for Java (MDD4J) but couldn’t find it