[TriLUG] Runaway Java Process

[Steve Hoffman]

I have a runaway java process that happens every 3 or 4 months or so that we
can't seem to identify the cause of.  top shows that this one process is
running @300%CPU and 24%RAM (full 2GB).  In the past we've just pulled this
server from the load balancer, restarted jboss (using java 1.5.0_10) and
gone on with our lives, but it makes me feel incredibly dumb to not know how
to isolate the issue.

What tools can anyone recommend to identify the cause of a runaway thread in
a multi threaded application and even better, once identified is there a way
to kill or renice a single thread as opposed to the whole process?

Many thanks in advance.

Steve