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 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.