Is there a console profiler for Java?

Question

Is there a gprof-like profiler for Java that can be run from the terminal in Linux? All tools I have found are GUI programs and I need run it from the terminal.

Answer 1

The JVM has a built-in profiler called HPROF. You can enable it on the command line like this:

java -agentlib:hprof=file=hprof.txt,cpu=samples MyClass

This will dump profile information out to a text file when the program finishes. In addition to profiling CPU usage, it can also track heap usage.

Answer 2

The open-source tool jvmtop contains a terminal profiler and might be worth a look:

JvmTop 0.7.0 alpha - 15:16:34,  amd64,  8 cpus, Linux 2.6.32-27, load avg 0.41
 http://code.google.com/p/jvmtop

 Profiling PID 24015: org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap

  36.16% (    57.57s) hudson.model.AbstractBuild.calcChangeSet()
  30.36% (    48.33s) hudson.scm.SubversionChangeLogParser.parse()
   7.14% (    11.37s) org.kohsuke.stapler.jelly.JellyClassTearOff.parseScript()
   6.25% (     9.95s) net.sf.json.JSONObject.write()
   3.13% (     4.98s) ....kohsuke.stapler.jelly.CustomTagLibrary.loadJellyScri()