Heap Walker - Reference View

  The heap walker reference view conforms to the basic layout of all heap walker views. Also see the help on key concepts for the entire heap walker.
  The reference view of the heap walker offers three view modes that can be changed in the combo box at the top of the view:
  • Outgoing references
    Shows a tree of the outgoing references separately from all objects in the current object set.
  • Incoming references
    Shows a tree of the incoming references separately to all objects in the current object set.
  • Cumulated incoming references
    Shows a tree-table of the cumulated references that hold the objects in the current object set.
  • Cumulated outgoing references
    Shows a tree-table of the cumulated references that originate from objects in the current object set.
The reference view helps you to find memory leaks. Please note the "Show path to GC root" functionality in the incoming references for this purpose.
  Incoming references in the reference view show compact paths for for some well-known collections with an internal reference structure. For linked lists, the "collection content" reference shown in the screen shot points directly from the linked list to the list item. If you search for paths to garbage collector roots, the found paths can be interpreted much more clearly that way.

Compact paths are also shown for hash maps and tree maps>. This is especially important in the cumulated incoming reference view, because the internal reference structure of those collections could fragment collection content into many blocks, thereby preventing a comprehensive analysis of the incoming references. Also, hash maps are very common in reference chains and the "map key" and "map value" nodes are much more descriptive than the internal structure.