I was recently contacted by Solomon Duskis to see whether I would be interested in assisting him with some performance tuning work he was involved on the JBoss RestEASY open source project. He was in particular concerned that his findings based on data reported by other profiling tools was inaccurate due to their excessive overhead especially when the entry point operations being tested had sub-millisecond execution times. Looking at the initial tests results of a prolonged benchmark run, which exhibited high GC activity and extremely short high frequency method executions, I thought this would be an interesting test for some new features I had been working on in recent software updates to JXInsight specifically adjusted clock time metering and self-optimizing hotspot detection. http://williamlouth.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/self-optimizing-java-hotspot-detection/

Sounds great, unfortunately, the product is really expensive for individuals and/or small startups/shops. Have you ever thought of creating a personal version or some open source license version, so folks can at least become familiar with the product? That might help someone pushing a profiler in their company. You might have more a advanced profiler here, but Yourkit gives their away for free to open source projects and an individual license is rather affordable. Ilya

Hi Ilya, You are not necessarily comparing like with like here in your categorization of expensive. JXInsight is a production targeted profiling (metering) solution with numerous different data collection techniques (tx analysis, distributed tracing, cluster wide metering & metrics, runtime state diagnostics,..) that can be used across different ALM phases/stages whereas YK is targeted solely for development usage and there largely memory profiling. All our server edition customers get access to a development edition version without any additional charge. So if you buy just one JXInsight server license and have 5 developer workstations you are effectively getting 6 YK licenses for the price of 1 JXInsight license. Generally the number of developer workstations is much higher so the savings can be greater and with a annual maintenance cost of 35% this very quickly becomes even much more attractive to any size company. Please note that JXInsight is not currently targeting memory heap dump analysis so one should be looking at YK, JProfiler, Eclipse MAT and NBP in this regard. What we are offering is a profiling (resource metering) solution that collects much more relevant data than a typical code profiler with incredible accuracy and at extremely low costs suitable for production deployment. The problem today with other solutions is that there is a big disconnect between what the developer views as the software/system execution model and what actually happens in production. Hopefully we are closing that gap with ever release (which is very frequent if you follow our updates posted on our company blog). All said we are planning on offering a free "education" (process time limited) edition in the new year based on our OpenCore initiative (http://opencore.jinspired.com/) with a slimed downed management console for Probes & Metrics analysis to encourage developers to think beyond single clock based timer solutions and appreciate the power and unlimited potential of multi-resource metering solutions which will become important when there is greater adoption of cloud services & cloud platforms (all of which are metered in some way or form). William