Java Power Tools

Chapter 19. Profiling Java Applications in Eclipse

Profiling Applications from Within an IDE

Recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the importance of development best practices such as unit testing and test-driven development. However, unit tests are not all there is to testing. High-quality software needs to perform well under stress, using system resources such as memory and processor time efficiently. Performance bottlenecks may need to be identified and removed and memory leaks detected and eliminated. Profiling and performance testing play a crucial part in this side of application development. And software profiling is an area in which it is virtually impossible to work effectively without a good toolset.

Most profiling tools, both in the open source and commercial domains, need to be run as standalone applications. You start them up when you detect a memory leak or performance issue in your application and run them against your application. However, when you are writing or debugging an application, there is a lot to be said for being able to run a profiler directly from within your development environment. This enables you to integrate performance testing and profiling directly into your day-to-day development environment using the tool with which you are familiar. In Eclipse, you can do just this with the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform, or TPTP.

The Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform

The Eclipse IDE proposes a rich set of optional plug-ins designed ...