Introduction
------------

Basically this is a decompiled and altered version of the original 
jvmstat. VisualGC is a great tool, it's lightweight, non intrussive
and gives you all the info you'd want to have that doesn't come in
one overview from jstat. The only thing I found lacking is a 
non-visual version of it.

I've added three classes to it that handle the main program, File
handling, that when appending adds YYYYMMDD to the file, the PrintGC
class which basically dumps and returns stuff and the main NotVisualGC
class. PrintGC should be renamed, but that will come with the next
version that can be used as an agent. It also hasn't been tested with
7.X yet, only with 5 and 6 so it might require incorporation with a
newer jvmstat version to support 7.

At a later stage carbon (graphite) support was added, the socket
automatically reconnects on disconnect.

For windows the CMD script could use some tweaking.

Usage
-----

It can either be used from the CLI/startup script or as a java agent.

From the CLI a pid is required, optionally an interval and a file that 
will be used to write to. 

As a java agent there are two options, the "interval,filename". If the 
interval and filename are omitted the default will be 
"1000,NotVisualGC.out-YYYYMMDD"

The graphite output is only tested with the agent, usage can be derived
from the file in bin/visualgc-with-agent-graphite.

funs@rope:~/notvisualgc$ sh bin/notvisualgc -?
Version 3.0_b07 12/10/06 - Requires Sun Java SE 5.0 or later with the HotSpot JVM
usage: (not)visualgc -help
       (not)visualgc <vmid> [<interval>]
       notvisualgc <vmid> [<interval>] [<filename>]

Definitions:
  <vmid>        Virtual Machine Identifier. A vmid takes the following form:
                     <lvmid>[@<hostname>[:<port>]]
                Where <lvmid> is the local vm identifier for the target
                Java virtual machine, typically a process id; <hostname> is
                the name of the host running the target Java virtual machine;
                and <port> is the port number for the rmiregistry on the
                target host. See the visualgc documentation for a more complete
                description of a <vmid>.
  <interval>    Sampling interval. The following forms are allowed:
                    <n>["ms"|"s"]
                Where <n> is an integer and the suffix specifies the units as 
                milliseconds("ms") or seconds("s"). The default units are "ms".
                The default interval is 500ms
  <filename>    Write output to a file (notvisualgc only)