Sun Java jstat does not work .. sometimes !

Question

I frequently use jstat to obtain GC related statistics. However, there are times when I simply cannot obtain any of the statistics from a JVM. It just says that it cannot find the process id, even though its the correct id.

Digging slightly deeper, it seems to be related to the "/tmp/hsperfdata" related files. On servers that have this directory/files, jstat works as expected (jps also shows up the correct instances). On the servers/instances on which it fails, I dont see the "/tmp/hsperfdata" directory (and jps does not report the pid).

Has anyone else run into this ? I read somewhere that the TMP variable needs to be set correctly, but I dont see any difference in environment settings between the server account where it works and where it does not.

Answer 1

Maybe this helps: http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=7009828