Generating a Thread Dump

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If Confluence is performing poorly, behaving unexpectedly or stops responding and you can generate a thread dump to help diagnose the cause of the problem. Including a thread dump can be very useful to the Atlassian Support team when investigating your problems. 

The thread dump shows the current state of each thread in the JVM, including a stack trace, so it needs to be taken while the application is experiencing problems. 

Information about what locks are being held and waited upon by a thread are not included in the simple thread dump that you can generate from within Confluence. If you need this additional information, you'll need to generate a thread dump externally.

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Security considerations

To help when debugging a problem, Confluence provides stack traces through the web interface when an error occurs. These stack traces include information about what Confluence was doing at the time, and some information about your deployment server.

This includes information such as operating system and version and Java version. With proper network security, this is not enough information to be considered dangerous. The username of the current user may be included.

Thread dumps include usernames and URLs by default. If you don't want to include this additional diagnostic information, you can disable Thread diagnostics.

Generating a thread dump within Confluence

To generate a thread dump:

  1. Go to Administration  > General Configuration > Troubleshooting and support tools.
  2. Choose Create Support Zip
  3. Make sure Thread Dumps is selected (you can deselect any other options that you don't want to include - if you're creating the support zip to provide to Atlassian Support, we recommend including as much information as possible)
  4. Click Create

A zip file containing your thread dumps (and anything else you chose to include) will be saved to your home directory. 

Generating a thread dump externally

If Confluence stops responding or you require information on locks being held and waited upon by threads, then use one of methods described in Generating a Thread Dump Externally.

Our support team may ask you to use this method if the simple thread dump generated within Confluence does not include enough information to diagnose the problem.

Generating a thread dump using the Performance Data Collector

The Performance Data Collector is a server-side, standalone application that exposes a number of REST APIs for collecting performance data. It can be used to collect data, such as thread dumps, disk speed and CPU usage information, to troubleshoot performance problems.

See How to use the Performance Data Collector for more information. 

Last modified on May 30, 2022

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