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<a href="http://community.jboss.org/index.jspa" style="text-decoration: none; color: #E1E1E1">JBoss Community</a></h1>
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Tips for reporting errors against an Eclipse Plugin
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modified by <a href="http://community.jboss.org/people/maxandersen">Max Rydahl Andersen</a> in <i>JBoss Tools</i> - <a href="http://community.jboss.org/docs/DOC-17304">View the full document</a>
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<div class="jive-rendered-content"><p id="reportingerrorsagainstaneclipseplugin">We got a lot of people using our milestones of JBoss Tools and Developer Studio and I get asked from time to time how to best report on issues they spot/find. I've started this article to outline some of the tips & tricks around this.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>Note: I’m not covering “obvious” things like actually opening a bug in jira, take screenshots and do what you can to write down the minimal steps to reproduce it and provide information like which version, OS etc. you are using - this article is about getting access to more internal details of Eclipse/Java to help.</p><h1 id="generalissues">General Issues</h1><p>When something fails in Eclipse it is very likely it’s log file has information about what caused the problem.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>The log file is located in /.metadata/.log.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p><span>Eclipse.org has more info about this file at </span><a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_can_I_find_that_elusive_.log_file%3F" target="_blank">http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_can_I_find_that_elusive_.log_file%3F</a></p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>In JBoss Tools we’ve made it even simpler to gather this file and a few other pieces of information in a zip file.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>Goto <code>Help > Report a problem</code> and a dialog will show up where you can fill in details of what caused the problem. When you press ‘Finish’ a .zip file will be generated which contains the log file, Eclipse system properties and your comment.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>You can attach this zip file to the related jira issue.</p><h1 id="freezesorslowness">Freezes or slowness</h1><p>In case Eclipse freezes or some operation is taking exceedingly long time to complete getting a thread dump is immensly useful. Luckily recent versions of Java comes with two tools that help makes this a breeze to get: <code>jps</code> and <code>jstack</code>.</p><h2 id="jpsjstackinshort">jps/jstack in short</h2><pre><code>jps -v
jstack <pid found via jps> > <jira-id>.dump.txt</code></pre><p>Attach the .txt file to the related jira.</p><h2 id="jpsstackdetails">jps/stack details</h2><p><code>jps</code> provides you with info about the java process id of the virtual machines running on your machine.</p><p>Here is what <code>jps</code> shows on my machine currently:</p><pre><code>[max@greybeard ~]$ jps
255
261
2295
264
4734 Jps
4381
3261</code></pre><p>In many cases you don’t have that many processes running and can easily guess which one is the one you are looking for (Tip: the higher the number, the newer the process).</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>In case you want to get some more details you can use <code>jps -v</code> to get more details, here is as small snippet of what it shows for me:</p><pre><code>[max@greybeard ~]$ jps -v
255  -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 -XstartOnFirstThread
    -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts -XX:MaxPermSize=256m
    -Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns -XstartOnFirstThread
    -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts -Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
    -XstartOnFirstThread -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts -Xms40m
    -Xmx512m -Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns -XstartOnFirstThread
    -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
4869 Jps -Dapplication.home=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0_26-
    b03-383.jdk/Contents/Home -Xms8m[max@greybeard ~]</code></pre><p>This should give you enough details to pin down which process you are looking for.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>Once you found it note down the process id - in my case above it is 255.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>Then you use <code>jstack <pid></code> to get the threaddump, below is a small snippet of how that will look like:</p><pre><p><code> [max@greybeard ~]$ jstack 255
2011-10-26 10:10:31
Full thread dump Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (20.1-b02-383 mixed mode):
"Attach Listener" daemon prio=9 tid=0000000003b8b400 nid=0xb1731000 waiting on condition [0000000000000000]
java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
"Worker-52" prio=5 tid=0000000003e83400 nid=0xb20c7000 in Object.wait() [00000000b20c6000]
java.lang.Thread.State: TIMED_WAITING (on object monitor)
    at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
    at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.WorkerPool.sleep(WorkerPool.java:188)
    - locked <00000000084188a0> (a org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.WorkerPool)
    at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.WorkerPool.startJob(WorkerPool.java:220)
    at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.Worker.run(Worker.java:50)
"Worker-50" prio=5 tid=000000000366e400 nid=0xb26d5000 in Object.wait()     [00000000b26d4000]
java.lang.Thread.State: TIMED_WAITING (on object monitor)
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.WorkerPool.sleep(WorkerPool.java:188)
- locked <00000000084188a0> (a org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.WorkerPool)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.WorkerPool.startJob(WorkerPool.java:220)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.Worker.run(Worker.java:50)</code></p><p><code>...<br/></code></p><p><code>...<br/></code></p></pre><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>This content is what we would be interested in.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>To get it to us the simplest thing is to pipe it to a file and attach it to the jira. </p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p>Tip: put the jira ID into the name of the file for easy identification/tracking.</p><p style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"> </p><p><code>jstack 255 > JBIDE-12345.dump.txt</code></p></div>
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