Advanced Java profiling

Question

Our company is currently looking for a Java profiler. We got an offer from Compuware (dynaTrace product) which is capable of giving this kind of output for CPU profiling (example):

(ok, I cannot post images, the rest of the question should be clear without this picture)

What dynaTrace gives you is a list of all calls of a specific method with exact information about how much wall time each call took, how much of that was CPU time and how much was waiting for IO. This (in my opinion very simple) info is very important and is what we absolutely need.

Now, the question is ... what other profiler is actually capable of giving this king of information?

I tried VisualVM (that comes with JDK), YourKit and JProfiler. I didn't find any way to produce this output with any of them.

• Measuring of total wall time and actual CPU time should be extremely easy with sampling, but it seems JProfiler and YourKit can only measure either wall time or CPU time, never both. VisualVM shows both wall and CPU time when sampling, which would make it better than any of those two paid products.

• Separing the calls of a certain method and showing results for each call separately (instead of aggregated information for a method with no regard for where it was called and with what parameters) seems like more advanced feature and none of these products seem capable of this.

These two features are essential for us in a profiler. If anyone knows a product that offers them, please tell, I'd be very grateful.

Of course, it's very possible that some of the mentioned profilers has these features and I didn't find out how to do it in the limited time I had to research them.

Answer 1

After a lot more investigating the answer is very simple: none of the mentioned profilers are capable of what I wanted in this question - not VisualVM, not YourKit and not JProfiler.

So if you want this kind of information, your best bet is probably BTrace, which is free and, in combination with JMX, capable of measuring pretty much anything. Quite literally - you have access to all method calls including all parameters and you can do whatever you can code in Java.

It also has very good examples included with the release so you will be able to understand the concept and customize the measuring within an hour.

Answer 2

While JProfiler does not display it this way, it has a notion of thread states and the CPU views have a thread state selector in the top right corner. This screen cast shows the effect of switching thread state. By default, JProfiler shows the "Runnable" state, not the wall time ("All states").