About GCViewer Commandline

GCViewer Commandline is a modified version of GC Viewer.

GC Viewer is an excellent open source tool by tagtraum industries incorporated, to provide a way to view the log file produced by the Java Garbage collector (GC).

This web site hosts a modified version of the GC Viewer tool (modified by Sean Ryan), which allows you to run the tool with NO interaction, from the command line.

This is quite handy, if you use a lot of automated tests, and want to monitor the Java GC.

The GC statistics are output to a CSV file, which can easily be parsed by your scripts.

Example Usage

To parse a GC log file my_gc_log.log to a new CSV file my_gc_summary.csv:

java -jar target/gcviewer-1.29.jar my_gc_log.log my_gc_summary.csv

This will summarise the statistics of the GC log file my_gc_log.log, to the CSV file my_summary.csv.

The format of the CSV file:

{field name 1}, {value}, {units}
{field name 2}, {value}, {units}
{field name 3}, {value}, {units}
...
...

Example CSV output file:

gcLogFile, temp_gclog_input, -
footprint, 128.25, M
footprintAfterFullGC, 69.792, M
footprintAfterFullGCs, 2232.118, K
footprintAfterFullGCisSig, true, bool
freedMemoryByFullGC, 2643.391, M
freedMemoryByFullGCpc, 9.9, %
avgFreedMemoryByFullGC, 17.623, M/coll
avgFreedMemoryByFullGCs, 3874.805, K/coll
avgFreedMemoryByFullGCisSig, true, bool
...
...

Download

Download Sourcecode

Download the Java source code here:

gcviewer-1.29-src-modified-released-20110405_1.zip

Download this guide as PDF

Download this user guide in PDF format:

GCViewerCommandline.pdf

History

Version | Date		Changes
1.29.1	24th April 2011	Started using Sphinx to auto-generate this documentation
1.29.1	4th April 2011	Added unit test for the CSV output, for the Sun JDK Made some changes to make the CSV more uniform, and easier to parse: Removed embedded commas from the value field in the CSV output Added another column for the units for each field Lines that had an extra value for std. deviation, or for %, have now been split into two lines
1.29.0	26th March 2011	Released GC Viewer command line, with this user guide.

Versioning

GCViewer Commandline follows the versioning of the main GCViewer application, and appends one number at the end.

For example, for GCViewer version 1.29, the equivalent GCViewer Commandline version would be 1.29.x, where x is the build number.

This makes it easy to see what version of GCViewer was adapted to have the Commandline functionality.