How can I profile a very large Java webapp?

Question

I have a very large Java app. It runs on Tomcat and is your typical Spring/Hibernate webapp. It is also an extremely large Java program. It's easy for me to test the performance of database queries, since I can run those separately, but I have no idea to look for Java bottlenecks on a stack like this. I tried Eclipse's TPTP profiler, but it really didn't seem to like my program, and I suspect that it is because my program is too large. Does anyone have any advice on profiling a large webapp?

Answer 1

The Visual VM profiler that now comes with the JDK can be attached to running processes and may at least give an initial overview of the performance. It is based on the Netbeans profiler.