How should I diagnose and prevent JVM crashes?

Question

What should I (as a Java programmer who doesn't know anything about JVM internals) do when I come across a JVM crash?

In particular, how would you produce a reproducible test case? What should I be searching for in Sun's (or IBM's) bug database? What information can I get from the log files produced (e.g. hs_err_pidXYZ.log)?

Answer 1

If the crashes occur only one one specific machine, run memtest. I've seen recurring JVM crashes only two times, and in both cases the culprit turned out to be a hardware problem, namely faulty RAM.