Posted on by Ram Lakshmanan

What Are Garbage Collection Logs, Thread Dumps, and Heap Dumps?

Java Virtual Machine (JVM) generates 3 critical artifacts that are useful for optimizing the performance and troubleshooting production problems. Those artifacts are:

  1. Garbage collection (GC) log
  2. Thread Dump
  3. Heap Dump

In this article, let's try to understand these 3 critical artifacts, where to use them, how do they look, how to capture them, how to analyze them, and their differences.