Performance Testing

I just upgraded my Eclipse IDE and installed the latest Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) release. The only tricky part of the installation was installing the Agent Controller (available from from the TPTP download site). This is a separate install from the TPTP plugin and must be placed on your PATH.

TPTP application profiling is easy. Simply start your application in profiling mode, then start the profiler before you access application functionality you want to benchmark. I'm currently using the tool to identify memory and execution time bottlenecks. The TPTP utility makes it easy to sort on key statistics (like the memory footprint for an object class, or the total time spent executing various methods).

I find the method invocation information especially useful. Not only does the tool provide information on which calls are taking the longest, but it also provides details for who called the method and what supporting methods are called (along with the time spent in each). This makes it extremely easy to drill down in the application to find to true cause of the slowdown.

Discussion

I've read that the profiling tool included with NetBeans is very good. Has anyone used this? How does it compare?

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