If you found Heap Dump Analysis interesting, you might also be interested in Identifying ThreadLocal Memory Leaks in JavaEE Web Apps from Igo Molnar. I saw this a day or so after my original post. He uses The eclipse memory analysis tool (MAT) to figure out what’s going on.
In his case, he couldn’t use visualvm as the heap dump was too large.
I downloaded MAT for my problem and had a look at it. It seems like it does much more than visualvm (there are may “pre-canned” queries available, plus an “object query language”). But that makes it correspondingly harder to use. I spent a while going through the tutorials to get the hang of it, whereas visualvm seemed to come together quickly for me. I suspect that if I ploughed more time into it, I’d get a lot more out of it. It seems to be something that I should learn before I get to need it again. 🙂
Jabbering Giraffe 