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Tracing · Visualizing

Creating a Program Trace

Jinsight is a tool for visualizing and analyzing the execution of Java programs.  Use this manual to find detailed descriptions of Jinsight's capabilities.

Tracing

To use Jinsight you first need to create a trace of your program's execution, using the instrumented Java Virtual Machine provided with Jinsight.

Creating a Program Trace  Information about using an instrumented Java Virtual Machine to create a trace of your program's execution.

Tracing Tips  Trace files can grow very rapidly.  This section has advice for creating manageable traces.
 

Visualizing

Visualizing a program trace  This section has detailed information about the mechanics of running the Jinsight visualizer, reading a program trace, and using the Jinsight workspace window.

Views. Jinsight lets you work with the trace information through various views, each depicting different aspects of your program's objects and execution sequence.   The following sections describe detailed information about each of the views:

Jinsight Views: Common Features  This section describes basic features common to some or all of Jinsight's views.

Execution View  Explore the detailed program execution sequence per thread.

Execution Pattern View  Browse recurring execution patterns in aggregated form.

Table View  See summary information about the run in tabular form. There are table views for classes, objects, methods, invocations, threads, packages, and user-defined slices.

Call Tree View  Study summary statistics for call paths leading from or to selected method invocations.

Object Histogram View  Examine instances of objects grouped by class, and their level of activity.

Method Histogram View  Examine methods grouped by class, and their level of activity.

Reference Pattern View  Explore patterns of references to or from a set of objects, in varying detail; this is useful for studying data structures and finding memory leaks.

Slices and Workspaces. Use slices and workspaces to filter extraneous information out of your study, and to create custom groupings of the information you are studying.

Slices and Workspaces: Introduction This section gives an introduction to creating and working with slices and workspaces.

Using Slices in Views This section describes additional capabilities in each of the views when slices have been defined.

Slices and Workspaces: Advanced Topics This section covers in depth the details of how slices work. It also covers operations you can perform on slices and workspaces.

Undocumented "Advanced" Features Additional features that are not fully documented. Some are early prototypes of ongoing work.

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Creating a Program Trace