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Article:Tips for troubleshooting a JVM crash

The Sun JDK uses a runtime engine called the hotspot JVM. This JVM has at least 2 compiler optimizers (client and server, also known as C1 and C2) as well as a shared runtime environment and a number of garbage collectors (gc).

This means that a JVM can fail in either of these distinct components and apart from the runtime an error can be narrowed down by selecting a different compiler. eg java -client or java -server.

The JVM will try and help diagnose a crash for you, it will print out a stack trace and try and work out if the current instruction was inside its code or a native library that it had loaded. The JVM traps many unix signals and generating a SEGV, which would be fatal to a normal app is part of the mechanism hotspot uses to allocate memory.

If the pc occurs in a native library then that is most likely that library at fault or the library is interferring with the JVM.

For more advanced notes see the Sun troubleshooting guide http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5/pdf/jdk50_ts_guide.pdf