Performance Cost of Profiling a Web-Application in Production

Question

I am attempting to solve performance issues with a large and complex tomcat java web application. The biggest issue at the moment is that, from time to time, the memory usage sp

Answer 1

I've used YourKit to profile apps in a high-load production environment, and while there was certainly an impact, it was easily an acceptable one. Yourkit makes a big deal of being able to do this in a non-invasive manner, such as selectively turning off certain profiling features that are more expensive (it's a sliding scale, really).

My favourite aspect of it is that you can run the VM with the YourKit agent running, and it has zero performance impact. it's only when you connect the GUI and start profiling that it has an effect.