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Remote App Profiling In Netbeans 4.1

There is a lot of focus right now on performance and load testing on the project that I'm working on right now. As a result, there are a lot of discussions on how best run tests, which tools to use, whether to instrument the code manually or use profilers to analyze the code. Since I needed to get results right away, I decided not to wait and try the Netbeans Profiler.

The profiler originated from a Sun Labs project called JFluid. It's a very interesting, relatively low impact profiling tool, and I encourage people to go have a look at it.

The most interesting feature for me is the ability to profile an application running on a remote web server. In this case, I have my web application running in on my development server, and I am running the GUI within the Netbeans 4.1 Beta IDE.

The docs have a lot of details on how to get this running. There is a twist that gave me some difficulties though. The documentation tells you to run this calibrate.sh script on the machine hosting the application to be profiled. What they do not tell you is that you need to run this script as the user that will be running the application that will be profiled. If you are running the Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 (which is part of the Sun Java Enterprise System) that would be webservd by default.

-- Fred
( Apr 19 2005, 09:54:30 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]