Have you had experience using profiling tools on production systems?

Yes, experience in profiling tools on production systems is important for identifying bottlenecks and optimizing performance.

Profiling on production systems is usually conducted with minimal impact on the application's operation, using tools such as:

• Java Flight Recorder (JFR) — built into JVM, allows low-overhead data collection
• VisualVM — for monitoring and analysis
• JProfiler, YourKit — commercial profilers with remote connection capabilities

Profiling helps to identify:

• Memory leaks
• CPU hot spots
• Locking and thread contention issues

It is important to perform profiling carefully to avoid degrading system performance, and to analyze the collected data for making optimization decisions.