Profiling a running Java application in command line

Question

I profile running Java applications often with VisualVM but it needs X to run on the machine.

I know I can connect through management port but that will be an offlin

Answer 1

You can run most commercial profilers remotely so an agent is run on the server then connect to that agent through a client on your dev machine. My absolute favorite profiler is JProfiler. It's fairly reasonable purchase, and it's very stable (which not all commercial profilers that's true).

http://www.ej-technologies.com/products/jprofiler/overview.html

Other commercial profilers that are stable, but not my favorite are YourKIT.

http://www.yourkit.com/

Those smaller vendors make good tools. These tools will provide you tons of information about method timings, memory use, GC, etc. Much more than jconsole.