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

With a completely independent profiler, it's much easier to integrate it with other applications in your toolchain. For example, say you want to run the profiler as part of your build process (say, once a night). Something like JProfiler easily integrates with ANT, whereas profilers built into IDEs may or may not. If you have a separate build machine, installing a local copy of a profiler makes sense, but installing a whole IDE just to get access to one component does not.