Ivan Lagunov's Blog

This article is a free translation of the Russian one that is a transcript of the Russian video lecture done by Roman Elizarov at the Application Developer Days 2011 conference. The lecturer talked about profiling of Java applications without any standalone tools. Instead, it's suggested to use internal JVM features (i.e. threaddumps, java agents, bytecode manipulation) to implement profiling quickly and efficiently. Moreover, it can be applied on Production environments with minimal overhead. This concept is called DIY or "Do It Yourself". Below the lecture's text and slides begin. Today I'm giving a lecture "Do It Yourself Java Profiling". It's based on the real life experience that was gained during more than 10 years of developing high-loaded finance applications that work with huge amounts of data, millions currency rate changes per second and thousands of online users. As a result, we have to deal with profiling. Application pro...

This post is just a short overview on the topic. Recently I've had to investigate a performance issue of a Java application running under JBoss server. This problem resulted in using a full-featured free Java profiling tool - VisualVM that is available separately and as an embedded JDK tool starting from JDK 6 update 7. Thus, it's most likely already installed on your system. This solution was great in localizing the performance bottleneck on the Production environment in my case. The list of features include monitoring CPU and memory usage, application threads, profiling, sampling, taking thread and heap dumps, etc. I advise to watch the video tutorial on the Getting Started page . Here is my screenshot: I'm not going to make a thorough comparison of different Java profiler tools here but this is a list of alternatives for completeness: YourKit  is free for open-source projects; JProfiler  is free for open-source projects; NetBeans profiler is embedded into c...