JProfiler
Best Java Profiling / Testing Tool
Please see the change log for a detailed list of changes.
JProfiler 8.0 introduces the following notable new features:
Tracking of RMI, web service and remote EJB calls between multiple profiled JVMs. Since JProfiler 7, there has been support for tracking calls between threads, such as for the executor and AWT event dispatch mechanisms.
JProfiler 8 adds support for tracking remote calls between two JVMs. Besides calls via RMI, JProfiler supports all web service calls through implementations that are supported by the web services probe as well as remote EJB calls for JBoss 7.1+ and Weblogic 11+.
Clicking on the hyperlink in the call site takes you to the execution site. For remote calls, the execution site is usually in a different JVM. A profiling session of that JVM must be opened in a separate JProfiler window. This works with live profiling sessions as well as snapshots.
Execution sites are bound to a specific thread. Multiple calls may be handled by different threads, so in that case JProfiler will ask you for the desired execution site.
The hyperlink on the execution site takes you back to the call site. The description of the execution site for a remote call contains a VM ID. This ID shows you from which JVM the call originated.
Internally, VM IDs are UUIDs, but to make it easier to work with them, JProfiler translates them to small numbers that are consistent as long the JProfiler GUI is open. The status bar now shows the VM ID of the profiled JVM.
NoSQL and big data. JProfiler 8 adds probes for a number of databases:
The MongoDB probe shows database operations grouped into the categories "Query", "Retrieve data", "Update", "Insert" and "Delete". Primitive data is replaced by question marks in order to conserve memory and to provide a basis for building a list of hot spots. For the events view, the MongoDB configuration in the session settings has an option to keep primitive data.
In the "Hot spots" view of the probe, events with the same description are grouped and you can open the cumulated back traces below the top-level nodes.
The MongoDB probe works with the official MongoDB driver starting with version 2.11 and higher.
The Cassandra probes shows CQL queries. Similar to JDBC, the probe has the event types "Statements" and "Prepared statements". Bound data for prepared statements is not recorded by JProfiler.
The Cassandra probe is supported for Cassandra 1.2 and higher.
Finally, the HBase probe records a variety of operations, resulting in the event types "Scanner open", "Scanner fetch", "Query", "Modify", "Map-reduce" and "Aggregation".
The Hbase probe is known to work with Apache HBase 0.92 and higher.
Recording profiles. To keep overhead at a minimum, it is essential to only record data that you are interested in for your present use-case. Previously, there was no way to easily activate a pre-defined set of recording types with a single click. Recording profiles in JProfiler 8 solve this problem.
In the tool bar, the "Start Recordings" button shows you a drop-down of configured recording profiles with an overhead indicator. It also allows you to create a new recording profile from the presently active recording types.
Retained size calculation enhancements in the heap walker. The classes view of the heap walker now has a "Calculate estimated retained sizes" action to calculate a lower bound for the retained sizes of all classes.
The retained size of a class is the amount of memory that would be freed by the garbage collector if all instances of that class were removed from the heap.
Support for profiling Java 8. All features in JProfiler are now supported for the current state of Java 8. We will track the remaining changes closely as new builds become available.
At the same time we have removed support for profiling Java 1.4. Java 1.4 used an experimental profiling interface (JVMPI) whose drawbacks prevented us from moving forward in a couple of areas, most notably for the performance improvements in our probe system that are mentioned above.
JProfiler 7.2 continues to be available for profiling Java 1.4, free downgrades are available for new purchases.