On large scale server class systems, the jps and jstat tools
are run with -server and a rather large heap and potentially
many parallel gc threads. This can result in the tools being
more intrusive than necessary which can impact the performance
of the applications running on the system. These tools should
be built to run with -client.

Other tools may have similar issues (jconsole, jhat, jmap, etc)
and should also consider using -client. The jstatd server used
by jps and jstat might also be a candidiate for using -client,
but it actually could take avantage of running in -server when
monitoring a large number of targets.