.. do not use hammer ..

..

"All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use hammer." -- IBM maintenance manual, 1975

Thread dump analyzer.. WebSphere..

Many times we might wait for our app server to respond back to us for some action.. and it never comes back (might be it doesn't like our action ;) ..) .. I got stuck in same kind of problem yest.. after deploying an app to WebSphere and click the save button, to save the changes to master config.. server didn't liked my action/application I deployed and I kept on waiting for it to reply back..

next I thought of taking a thread dump .. infocenter describes it well that how to take a thread dump but it didn't tell u where the dump file will be created :D .. finally i got the dump file inside the profile directory :) .. and got to know that server is busy talking to Tivoli Access Manager on my action of saving the config :) ..

Then I also got to know about a nice utility on alphaworks (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/jca/download) .. its "IBM Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer for Java Technology".. its a pretty nice gui .. gives u some analysis of dump u have taken very quickly .. just start it up and open the dump file ..