Someone recently sent me a summary of the different ways thread dumps can be generated in Windchill. It's the first time I've seen the different options listed in one place before and wanted to share it.
I end up looking at a lot of the thread dumps generated for performance and stability problems, and whenever possible I prefer to have them generated using the GetClusterStacks call (either of the first two options in the image below). The reason being is that some problems may originate in one MethodSever which then ends up affecting one or more other method servers, and it's usually against the affected and not the root cause MethodServer where the thread dumps are taken, cluster wide thread dumps work around this problem. When taking thread dumps it's best to take a series over a period of a couple of minutes if possible. A single thread dump is snapshot in time and is useful, but a problem can be better understood by watching what is happening (or not happing if the thread is "stuck") over time.
(Please click on the image to expand it)
