Solr with VisualVM via JMX

Recently I had a need to measure Solr memory usage and I decided to use free Oracle tool - VisualVM. As usual an official documentation provides some help, but to make things simpler I extended my Solr startup script for Windows to put all important information in one place.

The core change is to add a few JVM parameters on Solr startup:

 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote \ -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.local.only=false \ -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false \ -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false \ -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=18983 \ -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.rmi.port=18983

Documentation provides simpler way to do that, but I prefer to declare things explicitly. Having this parameters passed to starting Solr you can connect to server by opening VisualVM and choosing:

Local > Add JMX Connection > localhost:[port number, in our case 18983]

Below you can see an example of VisualVM heap memory output for Solr 5 indexing 1k documents.

Happy using but be careful, JMX connection should not be allowed in production environment!