SJK (JVM diagnostic/troubleshoting tools) is learning new tricks.

SJK is small command line tool implementing number of helpful commands for JMV troubleshooting. Internally SJK is using same diagnostic APIs as standard JDK tools (e.g. jps, jstack, jmap, jconsole).

Recently I've made few noteworthy additions to SJK package and would like to announce them here.

Memory allocation rates for Java threads

ttop command now displays memory allocation per thread and cumulative memory allocation for whole JVM process.
Memory allocation rate is key information for GC tuning, in past I was using GC log to derive these numbers. On contrast, per thread allocation counters give you more precise information in real time.
Process allocation rate is calculated by aggregating thread allocation rate.

more details about ttop

Support for remote JMX connections

Historically SJK were using PID to connect to JVM's MBean server. Using PID does not require you to explicitly enable JMX in JVM's command line and offers you OS level security.
Sometime you already have JMX port up and running (e.g. for other monitoring tools) and connection using host and port is more convenient.
Now all JVM based commands (ttop, gcrep, mx, mxdump) support socket based JMX connections (with optional user/password security).

Invoking arbitrary MBean operation

New command (mx) allows to get/set arbitrary MBean attributes and call arbitrary MBean operations.
This one is paralytically useful for scripting (I didn't find to invoke operation for custom MBean from command line, so I have added it to SJK).

more details about ttop

Code and binaries are available at GitHub
https://github.com/aragozin/jvm-tools