Which method is the least obtrusive for generating thread dumps in java?

Question

I am aware of the following methods for generating thread dumps in java:

• kill -3
• jstack
• JMX from inside the JVM
• JMX remote

Answer 1

The most performant option is likely to be the use of the ThreadMXBean.dumpAllThreads() API rather than requesting a text thread dump written to disk: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/management/ThreadMXBean.html#dumpAllThreads(boolean,%20boolean)

Of course, whether you can use that depends on whether you need a thread dump file, or just the data.