A thread dump is a snapshot of all the threads running in a Java process. It’s a vital artifact to troubleshoot various production problems such as CPU spikes, unresponsiveness in the application, poor response time, hung threads, high memory consumption. Thus to facilitate troubleshooting, we have seen enterprises capture thread dumps on a periodic basis (every 5 minutes or 2 minutes). So we were curious to learn the overhead of capturing thread dump on a periodic basis. Thus we set out to conduct the below case study.
Environment
For our study, we chose to use the open-source Spring Boot Pet Clinic application. Pet Clinic is a poster child application that was developed to demonstrate the Spring Boot framework features.