Generating a Thread Dump

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. Furthermore, if you wish to contact Atlassian Support for assistance about it, you should include a thread dump in your support enquiry to help the Support team determine the cause of the problem.

A thread dump will show the state of each thread in the JVM, including a stack trace. Thread dumps are only useful if they are taken at the appropriate time. They normally need to be taken at or close to the time when the application is experiencing problems.
Information about what locks are being held and waited upon by a thread are not produced by Confluence's Thread Dump tool. If you require this information, then generate a thread dump externally.

Stack Traces and Security

To help debug support cases and provide legendary support, 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.

Only non-personal information is supplied such as operating system and version and Java version. With proper network security, this is not enough information to be considered dangerous. No usernames or passwords are included.

Method 1: 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.

Atlassian support may ask you to use this method if a thread dump generated using method 2 does not include enough information to diagnose the problem.

Method 2: Generating a Thread Dump via the Administration Console

To generate a Thread Dump from the Administration Console:

1. Choose the cog icon , then choose General Configuration under Confluence Administration
2. Select 'Thread Dump' in the left-hand panel.
3. Click the 'Generate Now' button in the centre of the page. The output is displayed in a new text box that appears just below the button.
4. Copy the contents of the thread dump in the text box and save it to a text file.

Screenshot: Example of a generated thread dump from the Confluence administration console

Scheduling Thread Dumps via the Administration Console

If you were asked by Atlassian Technical Support to generate regular thread dumps, please set the Thread Dump Scheduler to take 2 to 3 thread dumps with a 30 seconds time interval in between so the Support team can observe any important patterns that may assist with the diagnosis of the problem. Attach the log file to the support ticket.

Example: Scheduling thread dumps from the Confluence administration console