EclipseMemory Monitor Plugin


Copyright © 2002-2005, KyrSoft

General Notes about the Status Memory Monitor

The Status Memory Monitor's Eclipse status line positioning, resizing behaviour and it's warn and auto GC features are by no means implemented in a fool proved way. So it's status line positioning and resizing for example is only suported to some minimal degrees, meaning here that the Status Memory Monitor doesn't resize and position in a good behaving manner on the Eclipse status line, when you resize and make the Eclipse workbench very small. This is due to the fact, that the Status Memory Monitor itself needs some amount of size/width on the Eclipse status line in order to show up in a well looking and easy to recognize manner.

Also the warn and auto GC size handling are only implemented in a simple manner, so when you are in trouble, you shouldn't trust them to work absolute flawlessly. Instead you may better manually press the Memory Monitor's GC button () to force garbage collection, which always first performs a system finalization and afterwards a system GC.

Further the Status Memory Monitor itself also occupies heap memory, when it is processed in it's own thread from inside the Eclipse Workbench. You can see that it refreshes/redraws from time to time, the default used refresh value is setup to 1 second, and that it's bar graph is thus refreshing periodically. When doing so, the Memory Monitor on every refresh interval determines always again the actual occupied and used heap memory. After some processing time, the older by the Memory Monitor itself previously occupied but no longer used objects are finalized (marked as no longer used and now unreachable) and the next by the Eclipse Workbench automatically performed GC will free up the memory those now null'ed objects had once occupied. This freed up heap memory space will then be again available and used for new allocated objects (thus it will be filled again with new allocated object memory).

However, there are usually also other Eclipse background processes continiously running and these processes of course are also occupying some memory, which you would have to consider when you analyze the shown up memory calculations.

Note that this Status Memory Monitor is usually not meant as a tool for detecting memory leaks or the like. For such tasks good profilers, which can continiously show up all running threads and the memory these occupy, are much better suited. So a Java profiler with memory leak detection capabilities, should be the right tool for such tasks.


Copyright © 2002-2005, KyrSoft