Profiling short-lived Java applications

Question

Is there any Java profiler that allows profiling short-lived applications? The profilers I found so far seem to work with applications that keep running until user termination. However, I want to profile applications that work like command-line utilities, it runs and exits immediately. Tools like visualvm or NetBeans Profiler do not even recognize that the application was ran.

I am looking for something similar to Python's cProfile, in that the profiler result is returned when the application exits.

Answer 1

You can profile your application using the JVM builtin HPROF.

It provides two methods:

1. sampling the active methods on the stack
2. timing method execution times using injected bytecode (BCI, byte codee injection)

Sampling

This method reveals how often methods were found on top of the stack.

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

Timing

This method counts the actual invocations of a method. The instrumenting code has been injected by the JVM beforehand.

java -agentlib:hprof=cpu=times,file=profile.txt ...

Note: this method will slow down the execution time drastically.

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For both methods, the default filename is java.hprof.txt if the file= option is not present.

Full help can be obtained using java -agentlib:hprof=help or can be found on Oracles documentation

Answer 2

Sun Java 6 has the java -Xprof switch that'll give you some profiling data.

-Xprof            output cpu profiling data