PSSCor2: GC Heap Analysis Commands

In our previous trip to PSSCor2-land, we’ve seen some object inspection commands tailored for ADO.NET and ASP.NET applications. This time, let’s take a step back and use some commands that display and analyze the managed heap.

The fundamental !DumpHeap command receives a minor facelift in PSSCor2—it has some new parameters. One welcome addition is the –gen parameter, which filters the output by a certain GC generation. Another great idea is the –random switch that prints every 1000th object so that your screen doesn’t get flooded with instances and so that you can inspect a random sampling. Finally, there’s also the –l switch, which limits the output to a certain number of objects from each GC heap.

For example, here are the LOH objects on my heap (note that the output includes natural LOH fragmentation):

0:006> !dumpheap -stat -gen 3
Loading the heap objects into our cache.
total 53,999 objects
Statistics:
        MT    Count    TotalSize       Class Name
0x00832328       44          704       Free
0x001a84f0       43       84,760       System.Object[]
Total 87 objects, Total size: 85,464

Another neat command is called !GCRef. Despite the similarity to !gcroot, this command shows you both references to the object (parents) and references from the object (children), even if the object is no longer rooted. Note that this command performs a complete heapwalk, so it might take a significant amount of time to complete.

For example, here is the list of an employee’s managers (assuming that the Employee class representing a manager has a reference to their direct reports):

0:003> .foreach (mgr {!gcref -shortparent 02500b38}) {!dumpfield -field _name -string mgr}
David
Kate

Next, the neat !CLRUsage command displays the commit and reserve sizes of the GC heaps, similarly to !eeheap –gc. Here are the two outputs side-by-side—you’d probably agree that the former is more readable:

0:003> !CLRUsage -v
Native Heap for .NET: 0x00470000
Number of GC Heaps: 1
seg base    start end   commit  reserved
02470000 02471000  02471024  000c2000 00f3e000
seg base    start end   commit  reserved
03470000 03471000  034764a0  00012000 00fee000
Total Size   0xbc494(771,220)
------------------------------
GC Heap Size   0xbc494(771,220)
Total Commit Size  000d4000 (0 MB)
Total Reserved Size  01f2c000 (31 MB)
Initial reservation type:
Initial Allocation Size: 0 (0) (0 MB)
Reserved Memory Size: 2000000 (33,554,432) (32 MB)
Reserved Memory Limit Size: 2000000 (33,554,432) (32 MB)

0:003> !eeheap -gc
Number of GC Heaps: 1
generation 0 starts at 0x02471018
generation 1 starts at 0x0247100c
generation 2 starts at 0x02471000
ephemeral segment allocation context: none
segment    begin allocated     size            reserved
02470000 02471000  02527ff4 0x000b6ff4(749,556) 00f3e000
Large object heap starts at 0x03471000
segment    begin allocated     size            reserved
03470000 03471000  034764a0 0x000054a0(21,664) 00fee000
Total Size   0xbc494(771,220)
------------------------------
GC Heap Size   0xbc494(771,220)

Finally, I covered additional GC-related commands in PSSCor2 in a surprisingly old set of posts about the Silverlight SOS (!ListNearObj, !GCWhere, and !HeapStat). The same commands are now part of the CLR 4.0 SOS, but if you want to use them with a CLR 2.0 process, PSSCor2 gives you just that.