Safety of generating a threaddump on a production system

We have a production Java system which is using a lot more threads than usual. I would like to use kill -3 pid to get a threaddump, and if necessary get a binary heap dump using JConsole for offline analysis in Eclipse MAT.

I am running Java 1.5.0_10开发者_StackOverflow中文版 on RHEL4.

How likely is it that either of these will kill the JVM? What about adverse effects on its performance while the dumps are produced?

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It won't kill the VM, but generating a heap dump will likely freeze the JVM during the dump process, since it has to dump a consistent snapshot. Once the dump has finished, it'll resume all threads from where they were suspended. So it won't be destructive, but it'll briefly stop processing.

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I use below command to get heap dump

jmap -heap pid

For details - http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/share/jmap.html