Chapter 5 Profiling Applications

The data analysis can be done at a different time and on a different platform than was used to run the application. For example, it can be done on a desktop system or on a laptop.
A non-interactive profiling agent will often impose less overhead than an interactive one.
The profile data files obtained naturally facilitate comparison of different runs or creation of a history of performance improvements.

The -Xeprof profiling option, available for the HP-UX HotSpot™ VM, was specifically designed to produce profile data files for HPjmeter. This option works well to capture performance data for viewing, and now can be accessed during a program run, as well as when starting an application.

-Xeprof focuses primarily on performance problems that characterize large server applications. Its relatively low overhead allows you to collect performance data such as the delay caused by lock contention, actual CPU time used by Java methods, and actual profiler overhead.

Although many features of HPjmeter are available only when -Xeprof is used to capture the profile data, useful profile data can be obtained from almost any JVM. No special compilation or preprocessing of the application code is needed, and you do not need to have access to the source code to get the profiling data for a Java program.

This guide also presents information on running the JVM with -agentlib:hprof , which also provides numerous statistics, some of which are especially useful for detailed profiling of memory usage).

Chapter 5 Profiling Applications

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