This post is just a short overview on the topic. Recently I've had to investigate a performance issue of a Java application running under JBoss server. This problem resulted in using a full-featured free Java profiling tool - VisualVM that is available separately and as an embedded JDK tool starting from JDK 6 update 7. Thus, it's most likely already installed on your system. This solution was great in localizing the performance bottleneck on the Production environment in my case. The list of features include monitoring CPU and memory usage, application threads, profiling, sampling, taking thread and heap dumps, etc. I advise to watch the video tutorial on the Getting Started page . Here is my screenshot: I'm not going to make a thorough comparison of different Java profiler tools here but this is a list of alternatives for completeness: YourKit is free for open-source projects; JProfiler is free for open-source projects; NetBeans profiler is embedded into c...