Efficient way of getting thread CPU time using JMX

Answer 1

Can you talk more about how you're planning on using this information? You can get thread CPU times using a JVMTI based agent, which should perform slightly better than JMX. How have you measured the overhead of the JMX approach that lead you to the conclusion of 'dreadful' performance?

Answer 2

If you are willing to use non-standard APIs, you can cast OperatingSystemMXBean to com.sun.management.OperatingSystemMXBean and invoke getProcessCpuTime(), as described in Using a Sun internal class to get JVM CPU time on David Robert Nadeau's blog.

Answer 3

Optimisations:

• invoke getThreadCPUTime inside a thread pool, since it seems to be network-bound;
• whenever a thread is found to be in Thread.STATE.TERMINATED, keep its name in a Map and skip querying the next time.

Answer 4

It must be the remote nature of your calls that is the problem.

I recently did a spike on asking a thread for CPU time uses and it was incredibly faster. In the context of a web application request it was nearly immeasurable. If one went into a hard loop it would costs you but typically you want it at the start of an operation and again at the end.