Build Your Own Java Performance Profiling Tool

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting look at creating a custom profiler using Java 5 and AOP. From the article: 'Profiling is a technique for measuring where software programs consume resources, including CPU time and memory. This article provides a list of best-of-breed features you might look for in an ideal profiler and explains why aspect-oriented techniques are well suited to achieving some of those features. It also introduces you to the JDK 5.0 agent interface and walks you through the steps of using it to build your own aspect-oriented profiler.'"

Comments

Re:Oh, please, that's EASY

[Aspirator]

That is pure Flamebait.

Java is a language which benefits more than most from performance profiling, in that
it is very easy to write inefficient code, because the mapping from code to actual
execution is not always very clear.

This is a strength, and a weakness. The degree of abstraction from the underlying
machine is high. This results in quite intelligible code, and an ease of coding complex
and abstract tasks. It also results in it being quite possible to write apparently
simple looking code which ends up executing in a very complex way.

Profiling will expose the gross inefficiencies, and allow them to be corrected.

It will never be possible to write as efficiently (execution time), as
in a more direct language, but the coding efficiency (programming time) is quite good,
and for a lot of applications that matters a lot more. It also has a lot of
cross platform capabilities (not perfect I concede).

I prefer writing code where I can see the bits and bytes (i.e. not Java), but
to put down Java in such an off hand way is unjustified.