Every day we try to find new ways to improve developer experience with IntelliJ IDEA. It may be a bugfix, a performance improvement, or a new feature (usually in this order). Today we’d like to introduce a new plugin called JVM Debugger Memory View.

The plugin extends the built-in debugger with capabilities to explore objects in the JVM heap during a debug session. The Memory View shows you the total number of objects in the heap grouped by their class name.

To open the tool window, use the main menu: View → Tool Windows → Memory View.

When you’re stepping over the code, the Diff column shows how the number of objects changes between debugger stops. This way you can easily see how the code you’re stepping over affects the heap.