When debugging performance problems, it is extremely useful to be able to monitor object allocations and frees in the new and old generations. The Java development kit comes with the jstat utility, which provides a ton of visibility into what the garbage collector is doing, as well as a slew of information on how each generation is being utilized. To use jstat to display garbage collection statistics for the new, old and permanent generations, jstat can be invoked with the “-gc” (print garbage collection heap statistics) option, the “-t” (print the total number of seconds the JVM has been up) option, the process id to retrieve statistics from, and an optional interval to control how often statistics are printed:

$ jstat -gc -t `pgrep java` 5000

Timestamp        S0C    S1C    S0U    S1U      EC       EU        OC         OU       PC     
PU    YGC     YGCT    FGC    FGCT     GCT
        98772.0 1600.0 1600.0  0.0   1599.8 13184.0   5561.6   245760.0   201671.9  
16384.0 6443.0 166683 2402.690 32411  110.564 2513.255
98777.0 1600.0 1600.0 1599.4 0.0 13184.0 9533.7 245760.0 156797.1  
16384.0 6443.0 166690 2402.785 32414  110.573 2513.359
98782.0 1600.0 1600.0 1599.7 0.0 13184.0 10328.6 245760.0 166402.2  
16384.0 6443.0 166698 2402.889 32416  110.580 2513.469
98787.0 1600.0 1600.0 0.0 1599.9 13184.0 2383.5 245760.0 195366.0  
16384.0 6443.0 166707 2403.016 32416  110.580 2513.595

The output above contains the size of each survivor space (S0C && S1C), the utilization of each survivor space (S0U && S1U), the capacity of eden (EC), the utilization of eden (EU), the capacity of the old generation (OC), the utilization of the old generation (OU), the permanent generation capacity (PC), the permanent generation utilization (PU), the total number of young generation garbage collection events (YGC), the total amount of time spent collecting objects in the new generation (YGCT), the total number of old generation garbage collection events that have occurred (FGC), the total amount of time spent collecting objects in the old generation (FGCT), and the total time spent performing garbage collection.

If you prefer to view garbage collection events as percentages, you can use the “-gcutil” option:

$ jstat -gcutil -t -h5 `pgrep java` 5000

Timestamp         S0     S1     E      O      P     YGC     YGCT    FGC    FGCT     GCT
99814.1 0.00 99.99 18.08 63.77 39.32 168551 2427.512 32800 111.800 2539.313
99819.1 99.96 0.00 66.29 78.18 39.32 168562 2427.649 32800 111.800 2539.449
99824.1 100.00 0.00 94.40 62.46 39.32 168572 2427.795 32803 111.815 2539.610
99829.2 100.00 0.00 60.25 65.08 39.32 168580 2427.888 32806 111.824 2539.713


The output above contains the utilization of each survivor space as a percentage of the total survivor space capacity (S0 && S1), the utilization of eden as a percentage of the total eden capacity (E), the utilization of the tenured generation as a percentage of the total tenured generation capacity (O), the utilization of the permanent generation as a percentage of the total permanent generation capacity (P), the total number of young generation garbage collection events (YGC), the total time spent collection objects in the young generation (YGCT), the total number of of old generation garbage collection events (FGC), the total amount of time spent collecting objects in the old generation (FGCT), and the total garbage collection time.

To get the time spent in garbage collection along with the reason the collection occurred, jstat can be run with the “-gccause” option:

$ jstat -gccause -t `pgrep java` 1000

Timestamp         S0     S1     E      O      P     YGC     YGCT    FGC    FGCT     GCT    
LGCC                 GCC
100157.3 99.96 0.00 66.27 63.82 39.32 169160 2435.394 32925 112.202 2547.595 
CMS Initial Mark     No GC
100158.3 0.00 99.99 32.14 67.72 39.32 169163 2435.430 32925 112.202 2547.631
 unknown GCCause      No GC
100159.3 0.00 99.97 50.22 65.10 39.32 169165 2435.454 32927 112.208 2547.662
 CMS Initial Mark     No GC
100160.3 99.97 0.00 6.02 62.46 39.32 169168 2435.493 32928 112.211 2547.704 
unknown GCCause      No GC
100161.3 99.97 0.00 32.14 62.46 39.32 169168 2435.493 32928 112.211 2547.704 
unknown GCCause      No GC


There are also options to print class loader activity and hotspot compiler statistics, and to break down utilization by generation (this is extremely useful when your trying to profile a specific memory pool). There are a number of incredibly useful opensource tools for visualizing garbage collection data, and I hope to talk about these in the near future.