Using GCToolKit to power a GC log file viewer

[fthevenet]

Hi,

binjr is a time series browser; it renders time series data produced by other applications as dynamically editable representations and provides advanced features to navigate the data smoothly and efficiently (drag & drop, zoom, history, detachable tabs, advanced time-range picker).

Using GCToolKit, it can now parse GC log files produced by the Hotspot JVM and turn them into navigable and customizable charts:

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binjr provides many advanced features for displaying and navigating timeseries data, which can be applied with great effectiveness to GC logs, like for instance the ability to show the durations of GC pause cycles as vertical stripes on the timeline, which can then overlaid it on top of any other chart, like the heap occupancy to visualize the effect of the former on the latter:

01KB8BMDY186BJG56RE9E2T05Z.webm

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Furthermore, binjr is a generic timeseries viewer, meaning you can use it to view data for different sources alongside GC log data like your application's logs, a Java Flight Recoder capture, or any other data from a CSV files or RRD database.
You can synchronize all of those different views so that zooming on one of them will also refine the timelines for the others.

You can even load the same GC log file both as charts and as textual log events, which is especially useful when chasing GC bugs (or bugs in GCToolKit) as the chart view can be use as an overview to figure out areas of interest on which to zoom in, while it turn automatically refines the text view on the same time interval, where you can find the fine grained details:

01K8R4TK7WSSGWP6TBDSGPCXEK.mp4

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binjr is Free and Open Source Software, entirely community driven and licensed under the Apache Software License V2.

It is written in Java and JavaFX, and pre-built binaries are available for Windows, Linux and MacOS, for x86_64 and aarch64 cpu architectures at https://binjr.eu/download/latest_release/

I hope you find it useful.

Cheers,
Frederic

[dsgrieve]

This is awesome! Has this been shared out anywhere?

[fthevenet]

Thanks for the compliment, @dsgrieve.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "shared out anywhere"?

To be honest, developing binjr is mostly a one-man show, so communication/advocacy is admittedly... err... minimal 😅
FWIW, there is a website, and a Fediverse/Mastodon account 🤷

[karianna]

@fthevenet - This is awesome work, we're very happy to see you getting value out of GCTookit and I'll definitely be taking binjr for a spin!

[fthevenet]

Thanks @karianna
Please let me know how it goes!
Cheers