What advantages have a commercial Java profiler over the free ones, e.g. the one in Netbeans?

Question

Occasionally I have to do some profiling work on Java code, and I would like to know why I should have my boss investigate in a commercial profiler as opposed to just use th

Answer 1

I've not used Netbeans profiler, but tried JProfiler, Yourkit and JProbe. I found Yourkit slightly better (mainly bought by the usability aspect). Some of the useful features in it are: (you can check if it is available in Netbeans)

• J2EE Profiling (Eg. It shows how much time an SQL query took).
• Snapshot comparison and annotation
• Deadlock detector
• Exception telemetry

You can check for more details at their site.

Answer 2

I would say that, ready to use and more performance statistics. I was assigned a profiling job last year when I was interning at a multinational. I used the InfraRED profiler which uses Java aspect oriented API (works with both Aspectwerkz and AspectJ). But I had to extend the profiler to get what my manager wanted. Also, the performance statistics given by the profiler was limited.

But before selecting the profiler I researched a few other opensource profilers. Some of them were trivial and didnt suit what we wanted.

I would also add that, some of them just doesnt work. For example, if we want to collect performance statistics of a web application, all the profilers doesnt support those statistics required for us.

Answer 3

Compare the features and see if you really need the features provided by commercial software over the free one. If yes then its worth investing.

Answer 4

If you are using Tomcat you might consider lambdaprobe

http://www.lambdaprobe.org/

(It is for free)

Answer 5

With a completely independent profiler, it's much easier to integrate it with other applications in your toolchain. For example, say you want to run the profiler as part of your build process (say, once a night). Something like JProfiler easily integrates with ANT, whereas profilers built into IDEs may or may not. If you have a separate build machine, installing a local copy of a profiler makes sense, but installing a whole IDE just to get access to one component does not.

Answer 6

I have experience using both NetBeans profiler and JProbe. For performance profiling I have found Netbeans quite useful but where JProbe is superior is for memory profiling.

JProbe has superior tools for comparing heap snapshots and finding the root cause of a memory leak. For example, in JProbe you can view heap shapshots visually as a graph, select nodes to investigate and then delete references to see if the instance could then be garbage collected.