Analyzing heap dump

Heap dump analysis is another important step in troubleshooting your Java application. As we have seen earlier, thread dump gives us a snapshot of the threads running in the JVM. This greatly helps us to identify the problematic areas of threads execution. A heap dump snapshot is little bit different to the thread dump snapshot. It gives us a snapshot of the heap memory. As you may recall, heap memory stores information about objects. This snapshot gives us very low-level information about objects like class, fields, primitive values, static fields, and references. It helps to identify various performance leaks such as class loader leaks, memory leaks due to not clearing an object reference after use, and so on. Now, let’s understand the heap dump in detail.

...