Analyzing WLS

A very (old) common question is how to analyze (stuck) WLS.

The first we need to do here is to take Heap and Thread Dumps.

Take several Thread dump and one heap dump (although the last one has an embedded thread dump), this will help to find out issues, OOM, connection leaks, recurrent garbage collector, etc.

Heap dump:

jmap -dump:format=b,file=/home/user/tmp/heap.hprof <pid>

kill -3 <pid>

   jstack -l <PID>

i.e.:

Last login: Thu Mar 23 17:57:43 on ttys002
hola$ ps -fea | grep -i weblogic
  501  6179  6178   0  4:04PM ttys001    0:00.00 sh /Users/German/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_Home/user_projects/domains/base_domain/startWebLogic.sh
  501  6180  6179   0  4:04PM ttys001    0:00.02 /bin/sh /Users/German/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_Home/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin/startWebLogic.sh
  501  6225  6180   0  4:04PM ttys001    0:56.60 /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_80.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java -server -Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:CompileThreshold=8000 -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dweblogic.Name=AdminServer -Djava.security.policy=/Users/German/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_Home/wlserver/server/lib/weblogic.policy -Xverify:none -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_80.jdk/Contents/Home/jre/lib/endorsed:/Users/German/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_Home/wlserver/../oracle_common/modules/endorsed -da -Dwls.home=/Users/German/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_Home/wlserver/server -Dweblogic.home=/Users/German/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_Home/wlserver/server -Dweblogic.utils.cmm.lowertier.ServiceDisabled=true weblogic.Server
  501  8061  7485   0 10:08AM ttys002    0:00.00 grep -i weblogic
[German@KDU ~]$ kill -3 6225
[German@KDU ~]$ kill -3 6225
[German@KDU ~]$ kill -3 6225
...
[German@KDU tmp]$ jmap -dump:format=b,file=/Users/German/tmp/heap.hprof 6225
Dumping heap to /Users/German/tmp/heap.hprof ...
Heap dump file created
[German@KDU tmp]$ 

Other important information would be to retrieve PermGen stats:

$ jmap 28705 -permstat

To get information of variables of java process (including classpath)

jinfo <pid>