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

If you are using Netbeans already then starting up the profiler is easy (unless you are using a Maven based project... sigh).

I have used paid profilers as well as the Netbeans one. Netbeans does the job well enough (it was a bit rough when it first came out... but much better now).

The code I profile isn't HUGE so I cannot say if the time spent in profiling is a major factor.

The answer is highly subjective and totally depends on your needs. Things to look at:

1) ease of use in your environment (in the case of NetBeans it is likely that the built in profiler is easiest.

2) time spent starting the prfiler to it actually getting you usable results

3) is it a sampling or tracing profiler? (An overview is here: http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-0757/ch05s01.html

4) can you view the results live or do you have to wait for the profiling to finish?

Here is a link to a slashdot discussion on Java profilers: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/0053237