Process and Threads
This first part of the workshop, we will begin to learn about looking at the JVM from its native perspective, and begin obtaining JVM based information to correlate to it’s native representation.
top
A very common utility as to monitor processes in Linux. For our case, we will want to monitor our JVM process. When just executing top, you will see all processes on the host:
top - 05:32:51 up 8 min, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.12, 0.06
Tasks: 62 total, 1 running, 61 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 11.2%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 87.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.3%st
Mem: 1020184k total, 466284k used, 553900k free, 17740k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 289500k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6730 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 108m 13m S 10.3 10.9 0:14.11 java
1 root 20 0 19596 1616 1292 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.56 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0
4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/0:0
5 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
6 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 kworker/u30:0
7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.27 rcu_sched
8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcu_bh
9 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
You can switch in this view to also view the native threads, by hitting Shift+H.
top - 05:34:15 up 9 min, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.09, 0.05
Tasks: 101 total, 1 running, 100 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.0%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 95.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1020184k total, 491176k used, 529008k free, 17804k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 312648k cached
Show threads On
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6736 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 109m 13m S 2.0 11.0 0:05.72 java
6737 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 109m 13m S 0.3 11.0 0:01.69 java
6740 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 109m 13m S 0.3 11.0 0:01.67 java
6746 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 109m 13m S 0.3 11.0 0:00.31 java
6768 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 109m 13m S 0.3 11.0 0:00.03 java
6778 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 109m 13m S 0.3 11.0 0:00.08 java
6777 ec2-user 20 0 15224 1332 1032 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.04 top
1 root 20 0 19596 1616 1292 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.56 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0
4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/0:0
With these native threads, you can now get better context of what resources are being utilized. To simplify this, you can target top to just watch one parent process and then show threads via:
top -H -p <PID>
In our earlier example, our PID was 6730. Therefore, this would produce:
$ top -H -p 6730
top - 05:38:05 up 13 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.05, 0.05
Tasks: 32 total, 0 running, 32 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1020184k total, 515940k used, 504244k free, 17932k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 336520k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6739 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.3 11.1 0:00.24 java
6730 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:00.00 java
6731 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:01.50 java
6732 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:01.07 java
6733 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:00.00 java
6734 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:00.00 java
6735 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:00.00 java
6736 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:07.33 java
6737 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:01.69 java
6738 ec2-user 20 0 2246m 110m 13m S 0.0 11.1 0:00.00 java
To make a simple standard capture of native threads for diagnostic purposes, you can do the following:
top -b -n3 -H -p <PID>
This will capture thread iterations of top by capturing threads of the parent process ID. You can then pipe it to a file.
Example:
top -b -n3 -H -p 6730 > jvm_native_threads.log
Java Utilities
There’s a couple of java utilities that can also be used to find the PIDs of your running processes.
jps
The Java Virtual Machine Process Status Tool can be used to see Java processes.
$ jps
7241 Jps
6059 java-perf-workshop-server-1.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
6925 jar
You can get more insight by using some of its flags:
$ jps -lvm
6059 java-perf-workshop-server/target/java-perf-workshop-server-1.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar server server.yml
6925 wiremock-standalone.jar --port 9090 --root-dir java-perf-workshop-server/src/test/resources
7582 sun.tools.jps.Jps -lvm -Dapplication.home=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/adoptopenjdk-8.jdk/Contents/Home -Xms8m
jcmd
The jcmd utility is an attempt to consolidate other utilities into a single interface.
Running the jcmd command should display some of the same information that jps showed us (similar to jps -m):
$ jcmd
6059 java-perf-workshop-server/target/java-perf-workshop-server-1.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar server server.yml
6925 wiremock-standalone.jar --port 9090 --root-dir java-perf-workshop-server/src/test/resources
7838 sun.tools.jcmd.JCmd
Thread Dump
To capture a thread dump of the JVM, there are many tools that can achieve this. You can do this over JMX remotely, sending an OS signal (kill -3), or just form the command line (jstack or jcmd). To keep it simple, we will just use jcmd as we will use it later for other diagnostic commands.
jcmd <PID> Thread.print
💡 You need to be the same OS user when invoking the command as the target JVM.
So, using our earlier example, this would be:
jcmd 6730 Thread.print
However, correlating a thread dump to the native thread state requires a minor translation. In your thread dump, the native thread identifier is in hexadecimal, while the native thread identifiers from top are in decimal. Therefore, if you notice a thread spiking in the top view, you would then want to understand what cod it is correlating to. You can do this simply from the command line via:
printf "%x\n" <Decimal Thread ID>
Example:
$ printf "%x\n" 6736
1a50
$
I can then cross reference this thread to my thread dump via the nid (native thread ID) field:
"C2 CompilerThread0" #5 daemon prio=9 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007efda40d4000 nid=0x1a50 waiting on condition [0x0000000000000000]
java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
An alternative tool fastthread.io also has a blog on other ways to capture a thread dump
jcmd PerfCounter
A very simple and quick collection of stats on a JVM can be collected via:
jcmd <PID> PerfCounter.print
Generally the information in this file may or may not indicate the actual problem, but can provide more context in a concise text file of what all has occurred in the life of that JVM. One simple set of counters related to threads are:
java.threads.daemon=20
java.threads.live=26
java.threads.livePeak=38
java.threads.started=697
strace
In some rare cases, you may need to figure out what system calls your JVM is doing. One way to do this on several flavors of Linux, is to use strace.
strace -f -v -p <PID>
Example:
strace -f -v -p 6730
Example output:
[pid 6741] futex(0x7efda4587228, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1 <unfinished ...>
[pid 6740] write(1, "DEBUG [2015-06-24 05:50:34,727] "..., 168 <unfinished ...>
[pid 6830] gettimeofday( <unfinished ...>
From the write call, we can see it is tied to the thread ID 6740. If we translate it to x1a54, which is then tied to this logging thread in the JVM.
"AsyncAppender-Worker-Thread-1" #9 daemon prio=5 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007efda44d1800 nid=0x1a54 waiting on condition [0x00007efd941f0000]
java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (parking)
at sun.misc.Unsafe.park(Native Method)
- parking to wait for <0x00000000f5d38d20> (a java.util.concurrent.locks.AbstractQueuedSynchronizer$ConditionObject)
at java.util.concurrent.locks.LockSupport.park(LockSupport.java:175)
at java.util.concurrent.locks.AbstractQueuedSynchronizer$ConditionObject.await(AbstractQueuedSynchronizer.java:2039)
You will notice that the system calls are quite noisy with the JVM, but this type of troubleshooting can greatly help when the JVM is getting “hung” or hitting limits by the OS and it isn’t clear from the exception that you are seeing what it is getting restricted on.