I run my app on production env (rhel 5.2 x64, oracle jre 1.7_05, tomcat 7.0.28) with JVM arguments:
-Xms8192m -Xmx8192m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m
-Doracle.net.t
Try these options
-Xrunhprof:heap=all,depth=12,cutoff=0
This will generate a dump file in the application root. Later you can analyse with HP Jmeter. This will give a snap shot of what happened to your 8Gigs of memory. You can see HP JMeter manuals here.
Also chose your Xrunhprof options wisely. The above option i mentioned would generate huge a dump file. From manuals you can find suitable options.