How to analyse Websphere core*.dmp file and Snap*.

Question

All, I have my application running on websphere app server 7.0. I get some of these core dumps and trace files like

core.20110909.164930.3828.0001.dmp

and

Snap.20110909.164930.3828.0003.trc.

My question is, just like the thread dumps generated by WAS can be opened and analyzed by IBM-Thread Dump Analyzer tool

is there a tool(s) to open the above mentioned files by IBM or any other?

Thanks, Ayusman

Answer 1

Eclipse Memory Analyzer is an excellent tool for analyzing the core*.dmp (and portable heap dumps, i.e. .phd files, too). To read those Websphere Dumps an additional plugin called IBM Diagnostic Tool Framework for Java needs to be installed (Update Site).

Before even trying to open big dumps remember to increase the tool's heap size by modifying the MemoryAnalyzer.ini and adding/modifying the line

-Xmx4096m

Adjust this number to your needs.

Answer 2

the core dumps have to be processed by the jextract utility (of the jre that dumped) fromn my webspere root this is ./java/jre/bin/jextract.

The resulting output can then be proccessed by ISA

Snap files are proccessed by the java trace tool ie java com.ibm.jvm.format.TraceFormat [] [options] from http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/realtime/v1r0/topic/com.ibm.rt.doc.10/diag/tools/trace_formatter.html for was v6

the output is readable

mike prendergast