Question

I want to know the location that JVM allocates to objects being placed in the system memory.

Answer 1

This is something you probably don’t want to do.

If you really want to do this, something like this code might help:

package test;

import java.lang.reflect.Field;

import sun.misc.Unsafe;

public class Addresser
{
    private static Unsafe unsafe;

    static
    {
        try
        {
            Field field = Unsafe.class.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
            field.setAccessible(true);
            unsafe = (Unsafe)field.get(null);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    public static long addressOf(Object o)
    throws Exception
    {
        Object[] array = new Object[] {o};

        long baseOffset = unsafe.arrayBaseOffset(Object[].class);
        int addressSize = unsafe.addressSize();
        long objectAddress;
        switch (addressSize)
        {
            case 4:
                objectAddress = unsafe.getInt(array, baseOffset);
                break;
            case 8:
                objectAddress = unsafe.getLong(array, baseOffset);
                break;
            default:
                throw new Error("unsupported address size: " + addressSize);
        }       

        return(objectAddress);
    }


    public static void main(String... args)
    throws Exception
    {   
        Object mine = "Hi there".toCharArray();
        long address = addressOf(mine);
        System.out.println("Addess: " + address);

        //Verify address works - should see the characters in the array in the output
        printBytes(address, 27);

    }

    public static void printBytes(long objectAddress, int num)
    {
        for (long i = 0; i < num; i++)
        {
            int cur = unsafe.getByte(objectAddress + i);
            System.out.print((char)cur);
        }
        System.out.println();
    }
}

But

• not portable across JVMs or even different versions
• objects can move because of GC at any time, and cannot synchronize across GCs so results might not make sense
• not tested across all architectures, endianess, etc. might make this not work everywhere