Gather profiling statistics from desktop client applications

Question

I have a numerous client instances of some desktop application. Some users of this application encounter performance problems while using some specific reproducing steps and their private execution context (i.e. let say using some private kittens photos that they do not want to share with anybody).

I would like to minimize the number of communication with users and reproduce their problems successfully on my development environment. I cannot use their execution context because of legal reasons.

So the only option I see here is to gather statistics of application usage (i.e. method calls, CPU load factor). Ideally I would like to simplify the life for users and just ask them to enable/disable statistics gathering in the application when they see some problems. All other (i.e. capturing customized statistics, transferring statistics to the support) would be done in background.

Looks like a rather common need. Are there any solutions that can help to achieve described behaviour?

Answer 1

JProfiler allows you to distribute the profiling agent at no cost and operate it in offline mode. The profiling agent is activated by adding a special VM parameter to the invocation of the JVM (-agentpath:...).

Then you can use the Controller class to record data and save snapshots to disk. The start/stop button for recording statistics in your desktop application would call these methods.

If the application is obfuscated, JProfiler can deobfuscate the snapshot when you open it.

To set this all up, create a locally launched session in JProfiler and then choose

Sesssion->Conversion Wizards->Convert Application Session To Redistributed Session

Disclaimer: My company develops JProfiler.