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Creating Thread Dumps

By creating thread dumps, you can help us fix program lock-ups (UI freezes, never-ending operations, etc.) and performance problems, among other things. How a thread dump is created depends on your operating system. In the following, we’ll assume SmartSVN has been installed in the directory install-dir.

Windows

  • Shut down SmartSVN if it’s still running. Also check that it isn’t hidden in the system tray, and make sure no more SmartSVN processes are running, by terminating any smartsvn.exe (and smartsvnc.exe) processes in the Windows Task Manager.
  • Open a command prompt and navigate to the directory <install-dir>\bin.
  • Execute bin\smartsvnc.exe > dump.txt. This will start SmartSVN and keep the command prompt attached to the program.
  • Perform the necessary actions to reach the program state for which you want to create a thread dump.
  • In the command prompt, press <Ctrl> +<Break>-keystroke to create a thread dump. Then wait a few seconds to create another dump and repeat this step at least five times in order to get a reasonable number of dumps. Check that the thread dumps were actually written to dump.txt.
  • Follow the instructions at the bottom of this section to send the thread dumps to our customer support.

Mac OS X

  • If SmartSVN is already running, quit it.
  • Open a terminal window and launch SmartSVN redirecting the output to a file: <install-dir>/SmartSVN.app/Contents/MacOS/SmartSVN > ~/dump.txt
  • Perform the necessary actions to reach the program state for which you want to create a thread dump.
  • Open a second terminal window and execute ps -A | grep SmartSVN to find the process ID (PID) of the running SmartSVN instance.
  • Execute kill -3 PID where PID is the process ID you obtained in the previous step. This will append a thread dump to ~/dump.txt. Then wait a few seconds and repeat this step at least 5 times in order to get a reasonable number of dumps.
  • Check that the thread dumps were indeed written to the dump.txt files.
  • Follow the instructions at the bottom of this section to send the thread dumps to our customer support.

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems

  • Open a terminal window.
  • Shut down SmartSVN if it’s still running. Also make sure it’s not hidden in the system tray and that no more SmartSVN processes are running. The latter can be checked as follows: SmartSVN runs as a java process, and you can enter ps -A | grep java in the terminal to find all running java processes. If you have other Java applications running, you may execute ps -Af | grep java to find out the process IDs (PID) of the SmartSVN processes. Terminate all of these processes, if there are any.
  • Execute <install-dir>/bin/smartsvn.sh > dump.txt.
  • Perform the necessary actions to reach the program state for which you want to create a thread dump.
  • Press <Ctrl> +<\>-keystroke in the terminal window to create a thread dump. Then wait a few seconds to create another dump and repeat this step at least five times in order to get a reasonable number of dumps. Check that the thread dumps were actually written to dump.txt. If so, you’re done. Otherwise, if nothing was written to dump.txt, try the following approach:
  • Open another terminal window.
  • Execute ps -a | grep java to find out the process ID of SmartSVN’s java process. If there’s more than one, you’ll have to try them all.
  • Send the KILL signal to SmartSVN by executing kill -3 PID in the second terminal window, where PID is the process ID you obtained in the previous step. Wait a few seconds and create a another dump. Repeat this step at least 5 times. After you’re done, make sure the file dump.txt has actually been filled.
  • Send the thread dumps to our customer support, as explained below.

How to send the dump.txt file: Compress the dump.txt file as a zip or tar/gzip archive, and also include the file log.txt from smartsvn.settings. Send this archive, as well as a short description of how to reproduce the problem, to [email protected].