This chapter provides information and guidance on some specific procedures for troubleshooting system crashes.
A crash, or fatal error, causes a process to terminate abnormally. There are various possible reasons for a crash. For example, a crash can occur due to a bug in the Java HotSpot VM, in a system library, in a Java SE library or an API, in application native code, or even in the operating system (OS). External factors, such as resource exhaustion in the OS can also cause a crash.
Crashes caused by bugs in the Java HotSpot VM or in the Java SE library code are rare. This chapter provides suggestions on how to examine a crash and work around some of the issues (if possible) until the cause of the bug is diagnosed and fixed.
In general the first step with any crash is to locate the fatal error log. This is a text file that the Java HotSpot VM generates in the event of a crash. See Appendix A for an explanation of how to locate this file, as well as a detailed description of the file.
This chapter contains the following sections:
