Troubleshooting hangs and pauses in 6951

I'm trying to switch back to Idea after using Eclipse for the past couple of months. I switched away due to frequent pauses (3-10 seconds) and hangs ( > 10 seconds) during normal operations. I installed Selena build 6951, and it seems to be better than 6.0.x, but I'm still seeing the pauses and hangs (though not as frequently). I'd love to be able to provide additional information to the developers, but I'm not sure how to gather that info. The application is completely blocked when this occurs so I cannot click on the memory or cpu snapshot buttons. Any hints on how to gather more info?

Our project is comprised of the following

~3500 Java source files
~3,500 JSP files
~10,000 JHTML files (legacy JSP-like)
~4,500 properties files
~80 3rd party jar files

Thanks!

Todd

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I see pauses on a WinXP single core machine, but none of a SLED 10, dual core machine.

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Good point, Norris. I should have provided the specs for my system.

It's a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 (circa 2004) running WinXP SP2 with 2 GB RAM and 256MB max set in idea.exe.vmoptions (I've played with that quite a bit and haven't seen a difference with it set higher).

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Have you noticed whether the memory indicator in the lower right corner is at maximum during one of these pauses and drops down after the pause?

How frequent are the pauses?

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Gordon

In most cases the memory indicator is not maxed out. For example, the last time it happened (an hour or so ago) it showed 152M of 190M.

Frequency varies, but if I'd say it's at least 5 or 6 times each hour. The 2-5 second pauses are annoying but tolerable, but once or twice in an hour it will hang for as long as 60-90 seconds.

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Is there anything common between different pauses to what you're currently doing or which file you're viewing?

Are you using an unusual file system or are the source files hosted on another machine?

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I am usually just typing in code. Code completion seems to be a fairly common trigger, now that you mention it, but just entering code without triggering completion will do it as well. I also cannot think of any differences between operations that my cause the longer hangs vs. the shorter ones.

Using NTFS and the code is on my local drive.

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Have you tried switching to incremental GC?


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I am trying that now. I am also keeping a log of the hangs, hoping to find a pattern of some sort.

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Hello Todd,

I am trying that now. I am also keeping a log of the hangs, hoping to
find a pattern of some sort.


You could run with -verbose:gc, and tail the gc log in a separate window.
That way you'll at least get some idea if the pauses are GC related or not.

In addition, you could try to capture CPU and memory snapshots from typical
activity.
I know these likely won't include the problematic pauses, but perhaps Jetbrains
will see other irregularities.
(You can upload big snapshots with ftp)

-tt


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Todd -
Are any of your pauses or hangs repeatable such that if you undo your last changes then repeat them you get the pause/hang again? If so, then get a CPU snapshot.
Is anything stored anywhere other than a local Windows drive, i.e. your IDEA project files, your content root, your libraries?
When you say it happens in code, does it happen always or mostly in one of your particular file type among Java, JSP, JHTML?
Jon

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Todd Breiholz wrote:

Good point, Norris. I should have provided the specs for my system.

It's a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 (circa 2004) running WinXP SP2 with 2 GB RAM and 256MB max set in idea.exe.vmoptions (I've played with that quite a bit and haven't seen a difference with it set higher).


256 MB max heap size? Isn't it too little for the project with the size
of yours?? A guess from me: the VM garbage collector tries too often to
sweep the heap since there is not enough. And when the gc does this,
every other thread is hanged. Try to increase the -Xmx to at least 512
MB. On a PC with 2 gigs of ram 700 mb is even better.

Good luck
George

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