I’ve been tasked with debugging a Java (J2SE) application which after some period of activity begins to throw OutOfMemory exceptions. I am new to Java, but have programming experience. I’m interested in getting your opinions on what a good approach to diagnosing a problem like this might be?
This far I’ve employed JConsole to get a picture of what’s going on. I have a hunch that there are object which are not being released properly and therefor not being cleaned up during garbage collection.
Are there any tools I might use to get a picture of the object ecosystem? Where would you start?
I’d start with a proper Java profiler. JConsole is free, but it’s nowhere near as full featured as the ones that cost money. I used JProfiler, and it was well worth the money. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14762/please-recommend-a-java-profiler for more options and opinions.