Determining Current Call Stack (For Diagnostic Purposes)

Question

For diagnostic purposes I sometimes need to store the call stack that lead to a given state transition (such as granting a lock, committing a transaction, etc.) so that when something goes wrong later I can find out who originally triggered the state transition.

Currently, the only way I am aware of to retrieve the call stack looks like the following code snippet, which I consider terribly ugly:

StackTraceElement[] cause;
try {
  throw new Exception();
} catch (Exception e) {
  cause = e.getStackTrace();
}

Does somebody know of a better way to accomplish this?

score 104 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 01 '09 at 16:17

104

I think you can get the same thing with:

StackTraceElement[] cause = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

answered Apr 01 '09 at 16:17

bruno conde

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As @nyx noted in their answer below, Java 9 introduced StackWalker, which might have better performance any some cases (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/49091729). – MyKey_ Jan 10 '22 at 18:18

score 17 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 01 '09 at 16:14

17

Well, you can improve it slightly by not actually throwing the exception.

Exception ex = new Exception();
ex.fillInStackTrace();
StackTraceElement[] cause = ex.getStackTrace();

Actually, I just checked: the constructor calls fillInStackTrace() already. So you can simplify it to:

StackTraceElement[] cause = new Exception().getStackTrace();

This is actually what Thread.getStackTrace() does if it's called on the current thread, so you might prefer using it instead.

answered Apr 01 '09 at 16:14

Michael Myers

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No need for `fillInStackTrace` (although it is easy to read its API docs backwards). – Tom Hawtin - tackline Apr 01 '09 at 16:16
The .class file/source I'm looking at right now calls native `Thread.dumpThreads()` rather than using a dummy exception. OpenJDK- 11+28_windows-x64_bin. Hyphen, plus, underscore, hyphen, underscore? I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. – Mark Storer Aug 14 '19 at 15:20

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered May 22 '15 at 12:58

3

If you want it as a String and use Apache Commons:

org.apache.commons.lang.exception.ExceptionUtils.getFullStackTrace(new Throwable())

answered May 22 '15 at 12:58

Edward Anderson

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score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 26 '20 at 07:49

2

There's a new option since JDK 9: StackWalker

It isn't as expensive as Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace().

see also How Expensive is Thread.getStackTrace()?

answered Jun 26 '20 at 07:49

nyx

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Determining Current Call Stack (For Diagnostic Purposes)

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