Tutorial: Profiling Java Programs

--D. Thiebaut (talk) 15:01, 30 September 2013 (EDT)

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This tutorial is intended to give a brief overview of JVisualVM, the profiler for Java. We use this profiler with Eclipse and use a 2D-packing application as our target application. Our goal is to figure out where the program is spending most of its time. The environment used to create this tutorial is VisualVM 1.3.6 running on OS X 10.7.5, and the hardware is a 2.8 GHz dual quad-core MacPro.

VisualVM

• VisualVM can be downloaded from visualvm.java.net. Once you have downloaded and installed it, you should be ready for running the application.
• The documentation for VisualVM is available here.

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The Packing Application

• The packing application we are going to use for this tutorial is a Processing application. The YouTube movie above illustrates how it proceeds at packing randomly sized rectangles into a larger rectangle.
• Setup the packing application either as an Eclipse project, or using the Processing IDE. If you are using Eclipse, do not forget to include the core.jar as an external library in your Build Path.