How to Quickly Diagnose Java Memory Leaks with JProfiler and Heap Dumps

Preface

Recently our company's old service suffered a memory leak that caused the service to become unresponsive. Here I share how I used JProfiler to quickly analyze the dump file.

1. Export dump

<code>jmap -dump:live,format=b,file=/tmp/xxxx.hprof pid</code>

2. Dump analysis

First, install JProfiler, preferably version 9.x, which can be found online with an activation code.

After installation, the

xxxx.hprof

file will appear with the JProfiler icon.

Double‑click to open and view

Bigger Objects

. You can see that Zipkin's

InMemoryReporterMetrics

occupies about 1.8 GB of memory.

Right‑click to view detailed instance information:

Proceed to the next step:

View detailed instance:

The screenshots show that a large amount of Zipkin data reporting caused the memory overflow.

Conclusion

This article demonstrates using JProfiler to analyze heap snapshots; its graphical interface is simple, and interested readers can try it themselves.