Old but Still Useful Tool: IBM Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer

Before the holiday, several clients experienced some issues with their systems. Over the past few days, after repeatedly reviewing various materials, I realized that I still need to take a closer look at the JVM’s GC behavior. That’s why I went back to this tool that I haven’t used in years (since it’s been a long time since I personally had to step in and analyze these kinds of issues): IBM Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer.

First of all, this tool used to be available on the Eclipse Marketplace. However, it stopped being updated in July 2025:

https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/ibm-monitoring-and-diagnostic-tools-garbage-collection-and-memory-visualizer-gcmv

It is now distributed through IBM Support instead:

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/garbage-collection-and-memory-visualizer

You need to sign in with an IBMid to view the full content (including the download link). IBMid registration is open to the public, so if you need this GC analysis tool, you can register for an IBMid and download it from there.

Since I personally use macOS (both x86 and ARM), I prioritized verifying the standalone versions for these two platforms first (and did not test the installation via the archived Eclipse update site for now).

First of all, the latest version of IBM Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer requires IBM Semeru Java 21.

Therefore, before launching it, you need to edit the gcmv.ini file in the packaged Eclipse environment (in a standard Eclipse distribution, this file is usually named eclipse.ini) and explicitly specify that the JVM to be used is IBM Semeru Java 21.

After completing this configuration, the app still cannot run properly on macOS.

The documentation mentions that you need to execute the following command in the extracted directory (the one that contains IBM Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer.app):

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine com.ibm.java.diagnostics.visualizer.product*

However, this command did not work for me on either x86 or ARM, so I still couldn’t launch the app properly.

Later, after interacting with AI, I finally figured out the correct command to run it:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine "IBM Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer.app"

After executing the above command, I was finally able to launch the IBM Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer app successfully.