This is a nice trick I learned over the past week while doing JVM heap analysis. You can use JConsole to take a heap dump of your JVM. Open the MBeans tab and navigate to com.sun.management, then HotSpotDiagnosticMXBean. This will display all the methods that can be invoked on this bean. We're interested in the dumpHeap method.

The JDK documentation describes this method as:



So the first parameter is the file name to write the heap dump to and the second controls whether all objects or just the live objects are to be dumped. If you specify false, it will include all objects that are not reachable and are waiting to be garbage collected, otherwise it will only include just the reachable objects.



-i