Inspecting SmartGit’s process using JVisualVM

JVisualVM is a Java Profiler which is part of the JDK and can be helpful to diagnose various problems.

• Install the latest JDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html (unless you already have a JDK installed).
• Run JVisualVM by invoking bin/jvisualvm.exe (on Windows). On Linux and Mac, locate jvisualvm which should be in the same directory as javac.
• Once JVisualVM has started up, locate the SmartGit-related VMs: there will be one main VM, if SmartGit is running (on Windows showing up as SmartGit, on Mac/Linux showing up as QBootLoader). If a SmartGit upgrade is in progress, there will be an additional VM (on Windows showing up as SmartGitUpdater). If SSH connections are currently in progress, there may be more VMs.

Note

If you can’t connect to SmartGitUpdater VM, try again running JVisualVM as administrator, because SmartGitUpdater is usually invoked with administrative privileges, too.

Taking thread dumps

Thread dumps are useful to investigate hangs or slow performance.

• Select the VM you want to inspect.
• Select tab Threads and invoke Thread Dump.
• When investigating a problem, it’s usually a good idea to create a couple of thread dumps.

Taking a heap dump

Heap dumps are useful to investigate memory-related problems.

• Select the VM you want to inspect.
• Select tab Monitor and invoke Heap Dump.
• The Classes section will give you a good overview of the memory usage: sorting by Instances and Size can be helpful to detect (unusually) large occurrences of specific classes. By double-clicking a certain class, you will switch to the Instances view which gives you detailed information for every object of this class.

Note

For heap dumps, it’s expected to see a lot of char[], byte[] and String objects, as version control is more or less all about bytes and texts (paths, file contents, commit messages).