Profile Tomcat Application With VisualVM

Question

I would like to profile an application that runs on Tomcat with the VisualVM tool. Unfortunately, when I tell VisualVM to profile Tomcat, Tomcat prints out a couple of messages indicating it is connecting to a profile tool and then simply exits.

Details…

I am using Windows XP, Tomcat 6, VisualVM 1.2.1, and JDK 1.6.0_11.

1. In Visual VM, I right-click on the Tomcat Application and select “Profile”
2. In the Profiler Tab, I press the Memory button (or the CPU button).
3. Tomcat exits

Note that if I right-click on the Tomcat Application and select “Heap Dump” that seems to work OK.

Answer 1

I have VisualVM profiling working with my Tomcat application now. I needed to add the following parameters to the tomcat startup:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=8086

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false

Here is a nice article on monitoring Tomcat with VisualVM:

http://mpwoodward.posterous.com/monitoring-tomcat-with-java-visualvm

Answer 2

here's another nice article from matt on profiling tomcat with VisualVM:

http://blog.mattwoodward.com/monitoring-tomcat-with-java-visualvm