FULL PRODUCT VERSION :
java version " 1.7.0_21 "
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_21-b11)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.21-b01, mixed mode)


ADDITIONAL OS VERSION INFORMATION :
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]

A DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM :
  To my horror, when debugging a program just now, I found that ThreadInfo.toString always cuts off the stack trace after 8 elements.

In my case today, this bug caused it to not print out critical information that I needed for debugging. (The thread was deep into some low level library I/O code, so the crucial stack elements from my application classes were missed.)

Looking at the source code for ThreadInfo.toString, the bug is obvious: it drops all stack trace elements with an index > MAX_FRAMES (it summarizes them all as " ... " ).

The problem is that MAX_FRAMES is a private static final constant set to 8.

There are a couple of possible solutions:

1) drop that stupid MAX_FRAMES functionality altogether
2) add a static setter method so that users can configure MAX_FRAMES
3) have a toString method that takes an int arg which overides MAX_FRAMES

ThreadInfo


REPRODUCIBILITY :
This bug can be reproduced always.

CUSTOMER SUBMITTED WORKAROUND :
Copy the ThreadInfo.toString source code and manually rip out the MAX_FRAMES limitation.

Besides having to do this, this solution is very bad because it only works for code under my control, and not for 3rd party code.