Java Profilers - Which One Are You Using?

splitPersonality asks: "Our Java programmers are researching various profilers to use in-house. We would appreciate some feedback from other shops that are using Java profilers. Along with the specific product, would you please include reasons behind your choice? If you now have misgivings about the one you or your shop chose, please let me know about those, as well."

Comments

YourKit: awesome profiler

[jnana]

I give my most enthusiastic recommendation to YourKit. It takes about a minute to install, has optional integration (1-click) with Eclipse, IDEA, Netbeans. I use Eclipse, and the integration there adds a new 'Profile as' options that works just like the 'run as' and 'debug as' launch options.

YourKit is extremely easy to use thanks to a very intuitive interface.. All the java developers I've shown it to have been as impressed as I've been. It is cheaper than most profilers -- I got a deal on it for $125 a few months ago, which I is about 25% of the normal price, but it's still cheap at $499. It's not open-source, but they have a forum where they answer they questions extremely quickly. I've had 1 or 2 bugs since I've been using it (about 10 months), since I like to use the early release version for newer features, and both have been fixed within days, with a new build released within a week or so. Memory leaks are a snap to find using it's "compare snapshot", which lets you compare 2 snapshots and shows you what the difference is -- memory leak is generally the difference if you capture your snapshots intelligently.

Anyway, I can't speak highly enough of the product. For the record, I have no affiliation with them at all. I'm just a very happy customer.

My only minor gripe is that under some circumstances, the fastest CPU profiling option (unnoticeable impact on the running app) can give inaccurate results, in which case I have to use one of the two slower CPU profiling options, which are much, much slower--but that's certainly not particular to YourKit.

JRat

[Anonymous Coward]

JRat is open-source, and works anywhere using bytecode injection. It's the only serious solution for profiling applications running in production as it

A) doesn't require much overhead
B) doesn't require code changes
C) doesn't require some sort of front-end to monitor or use
D) doesn't have a rediculous cost per server
E) runs in your typical environment, not some magical profiling IDE option

We use this every day (via an ant task) to profile a Wall Street trading system that handles billions of dollars of transactions every week. Would you trust that to anything else?

Signing anon because my employment contract specifically prevents me from revealing this sort of thing :) Enjoy.

Re:-1 troll +5 funny

[DrSkwid]

This java so any one of :

• An hourglass
• The tides
• Phases of the moon
• Glacial movement
• Radio active decay of Carbon-14
• Radio active decay of Cadmium-116