IBM Whole-System Analysis Tool (WAIT)

Overview

WAIT is a free, secure, online service provided by IBM Research to analyze thread dumps. The primary difference between WAIT and TMDA is that WAIT has a stack frame analysis engine which aggregates threads by function, both logically (e.g. waiting on database), and from a human-centric point of view (e.g. applicationFunction1).

Features and Benefits

• Advanced stack frame analysis converted into a human understandable form
• HTML report which is easy to share
• Either use a long running collection script provided by WAIT (which also analyzes CPU data) or ZIP up a set of javacores

Installation

1. Register at https://wait.ibm.com/auth/newuser.html
2. Download a collection script: https://wait.ibm.com/#page=dataCollectors
3. Upload the ZIP file to WAIT: https://wait.ibm.com/#page=submit

Usage

Here is an example screenshot of a report. The top portion summarizes thread states (runnable, waiting, etc.) along with CPU utilization. The subsequent sections try to find particular hotspots based on activity (in this case database queries) and application function (in this case, getClosedOrders).