Forewarned is forearmed, or so the saying goes. This means in the event of an incident, it’s always best to have as much logging information available for diagnosis and remediation as is reasonable. Garbage collection is a crucial part of keeping my JVM happy, so I like to get garbage collection logging enabled before I need it rather than after. In the pattern used by Atlassian’s Java apps, we will enable logging using the setenv.sh file, in the JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS variable. Use the following context:
-XX:+PrintGC -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:<file>If you prefer to have actual system datestamps logged instead of millis offset from VM Launch, use -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps instead of -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps.
This will set up your system to log every garbage collection run into a text file that will be generated in your <product-install>/logs folder for easy retrieval. This file will be destroyed and a new one generated every time you start the JVM, so you’ll want to retrieve it beforehand if you need to restart the application.
Garbage collection tuning is as much an art as a science. For more advice on how to tune garbage collection in Stash, check out this page: Garbage Collection Tuning. The guidelines found at that page are suitable for any tuning project.
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