My team is running into difficulties when trying to take good heap dumps triggered by OutOfMemoryErrors. For specific reasons we are currently taking the dumps with jmap called from a bash script instead of using the HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError flag. We're using a 64-bit 1.6 JVM with a heap size around 3 GB. Our heap dumps fail 90% of the time (guesstimate).

Is there anything we can do to improve our odds of getting a clean heap dump we can use to troubleshoot memory problems? I have read that jmap had major issues in Java 1.4 but that those issues should be mostly addressed now.