How do I investigate the cause of a JVM crash?

Question

One day ago, after a few months of normal working, our java app starts to crash occasionally with the following error:

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# A fatal error has been detected by         


        

Answer 1

I can see from the error report that you have the YourKit agent loaded. Its telemetry thread is mentioned as the requester for the operation that appears to fail. Try running the application without the YJP agent to see if you can still reproduce the crash.

Generally, JVM crashes are pretty hard to diagnose. They could happen due to a bug in some JNI code or in the JRE itself. If you suspect the latter, it may be worth submitting a bug report to Oracle.

Either way, I'd recommend to upgrade to the latest release of Java 6 to make sure it's not a known issue that's already been fixed. At the time of this writing the current release is Java 6 update 29.