Difference between javacore, thread dump and heap dump in Websphere

Question

Can someone tell me the exact difference between javacore, thread dump and heap dump? Under which situation each of these are used??

Answer 1

JVM head dump is a snapshot of a JVM heap memory in a given time. So its simply a heap representation of JVM. That is the state of the objects.

JVM thread dump is a snapshot of a JVM threads at a given time. So thats what were threads doing at any given time. This is the state of threads. This helps understanding such as locked threads, hanged threads and running threads.

Head dump has more information of java class level information than a thread dump. For example Head dump is good to analyse JVM heap memory issues and OutOfMemoryError errors. JVM head dump is generated automatically when there is something like OutOfMemoryError has taken place. Heap dump can be created manually by killing the process using kill -3 . Generating a heap dump is a intensive computing task, which will probably hang your jvm. so itsn't a methond to use offetenly. Heap can be analysed using tools such as eclipse memory analyser.

Core dump is a os level memory usage of objects. It has more informaiton than a head dump. core dump is not created when we kill a process purposely.