I was attempting to work with VisualVM and Tomcat over the past few days on Snow Leopard and it was constantly failing. I was getting errors like this:

    "attach: task_for_pid(59980) failed (5)"

I was also getting errors inside VisualVM and from the command like using jmap that went like this:

Attaching to process ID 61218, please wait...
sun.jvm.hotspot.debugger.NoSuchSymbolException: Could not find symbol "heapOopSize" in any of the known library names (-)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.HotSpotTypeDataBase.lookupInProcess(HotSpotTypeDataBase.java:399)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.HotSpotTypeDataBase.readVMIntConstants(HotSpotTypeDataBase.java:319)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.HotSpotTypeDataBase.<init>(HotSpotTypeDataBase.java:88)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.MacOSXTypeDataBase.<init>(MacOSXTypeDataBase.java:36)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.bugspot.BugSpotAgent.setupVM(BugSpotAgent.java:578)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.bugspot.BugSpotAgent.go(BugSpotAgent.java:499)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.bugspot.BugSpotAgent.attach(BugSpotAgent.java:337)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.tools.Tool.start(Tool.java:163)
	at sun.jvm.hotspot.tools.HeapDumper.main(HeapDumper.java:77)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
	at sun.tools.jmap.JMap.runTool(JMap.java:179)
	at sun.tools.jmap.JMap.main(JMap.java:110)
Debugger attached successfully.
sun.jvm.hotspot.tools.HeapDumper requires a java VM process/core!

And I also got some other strange errors from jmap like this one:

61218: Unable to open socket file: target process not responding or HotSpot VM not loaded
The -F option can be used when the target process is not responding

I opened an issue with the VisualVM team and they tested things out on Snow Leopard and said it all worked fine. I figured they were smokin’ something and decided to try a Sun product and see if it worked. I fired up NetBeans and sure enough, VisualVM and jmap worked great. This indicated it was definitely a VM configuration issue.

Here’s the what you need to do to get your Java applications working with the VM tools on Snow Leopard. Add the following parameters to the java command and everything will start working fine:

java -Xverify:none -Xshare:off -Xcom.sun.management.jmxremote

The -Xverify:none is the setting that allows VisualVM and jmap to capture thread dumps. Without this setting, you’ll get strange errors like those above. The -Xshare:off gets VisualVM working without any startup errors or random failures. The last setting is really just for JConsole and other JMX tools.

Enjoy!