Which Java profiler is better: JProfiler or YourKit?

Question

Which profiler is best suited for general profile profiling and heap analysis? 90% of our applications are standalone command line programs with significant processing of the database and numerical data. The other 10% are webapps / servlet container applications (with very small JSPs and NO SCRIPLETS!). The target user will be an Sr software engineer with 5-10 years of industry experience. We need support only for Sun JDK 5 and.

As this question wrote (2008-10-02), JProfiler was at 5.1.4, and YourKit was at 7.5. YourKit 8.0 seems to be coming soon.

Answer 1

I used both JProfiler 4 and YourKit 7.5, and YourKit wins. It is so less invasive than JProfile, since I will be happy to start servers with MyKit installed, which I will never do with JProfiler.

In addition, the analysis tool that comes with YourKit is more intuitive (in my opinion), which makes it easier to get the root cause of the problems.

Answer 2

If you are on jdk> = 1.6_07, you can also look at jvisualvm, which comes bundled.

Answer 3

I recently used both JProfiler and Yourkit, and I found that yourkit is far superior to analyzing memory problems and strongly prefers jprofiler for performance analysis. Yourkit memory analysis seems a lot simpler and more intuitive. To analyze the performance on yourkit, I was unsuccessful in solving any performance problem that I was trying to solve with yourkit. JProfiler shows more accurate and concise performance analysis information with the exact number of method calls and the percentage of time spent on each method. I have not found it in your hands. Yourkit seems to just provide sample information that is not accurate unless you measure thousands of calls.

Answer 4

None of the tools except JXInsight does a real analysis of database transactions:

http://www.jinspired.com/products/jxinsight/concurrency.html http://www.jinspired.com/products/jxinsight/olapvsoltp.html

JXInsight Probes is also the only technology that can even run in production, given that we are profiling netbeans at 20x and yourkit 100x in SPECjvm2008 tests.

http://blog.jinspired.com/?p=272

I’m the architect of JXInsight, so of course I’m completely biased, but at the same time I’m probably more qualified than most in the Java industry to make such an expression, as I have devoted the last 8 years to performance analysis for some of the most demanding Java applications / J2EE in production.

I must point out that JXInsight is for software engineers, not just for a casual adhoc profiling session. We have more than 4000 system properties for setting up the runtime environment and 600+ technology extensions, so it may be redundant if you have a difficult problem to solve and / or use the same tool for development, testing and production.

Respectfully,

William

Answer 5

I made extensive use of JProbe, OptimizeIt, and YourKit, and they are all capable tools. Out of 3, my favorite is YourKit.

The only killer feature in JProbe is the ability to transition from a snapshot to an annotated source (with counts and timings). I found this extremely useful.

Answer 6

I used both, and my voice is now definitely JProfiler (in the current version 6), as it is easier to use and has many useful additional features. YourKit had some advantages with large snapshots in previous releases, but this is no longer the case.

Answer 7

With Java 7 Update 40, Oracle has included Java Mission Management (originally part of the JRockit JDK), a very powerful performance tuning tool that can compete with yourkit / jprofiler.

Take a look and be surprised.

Answer 8

I used yourkit and it is a very good profiler, the best of which I have ever used in java (over the years I have used many others). that, as they say, I never used jprofiler, so I can not give a direct comparison.

Answer 9

Definitely YourKit ... He was able to open 4 gigabytes of dumping heaps using just 1 g of heap. While the Jprofiler with the same heap distribution crashed!

Answer 10

For fast and dirty profiling of command line programs, JIP works very well.

Answer 11

I have used JProfiler for many years and am very pleased with this. IntelliJ seems to switch its recommendation back and forth between YourKit and JProfiler, so I would suggest that their functionality is similar. I believe they both have a trial version.

Answer 12

DISCLAIMER: Alternative answer.

They have various products for monitoring production / profiling. UNLIKE other time development tools: http://www.jinspired.com/products/jxinsight/
This post on theserverside on JDBInsight: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=13488

DISCLAIMER: I am NOT affiliated with this company at any level.

Answer 13

I used YourKit. I have not used JProfiler. I used to use OptimizeIt. I have a very good opinion about YourKit. It has a very stable and good graphical interface and a good list of features. One unique feature that I noticed is the profiling of the CPU with and without latency (like I / O wais), including.

It is also very reasonable (around $ 1,100 for 5 licenses I think)

Answer 14

YourKit It has low overhead, stable, easy to install on the JVM for profiling (only one dll) and powerful. For dump heap analysis, this is the only profiler that comes close to the Eclipse Memory Analyzer .

Answer 15

I used only JProfiler (and some JProbe). As far as I can tell, one of YourKit's limitations is that they don't seem to support JDK 1.4.2. This is not a problem for many people, but it can be.

Answer 16

As an aside, you can consider the Netbeans profiler - this is pretty good. But I did not use either of the two you mentioned.

Answer 17

YourKit is great. You can also check the profiler built into NetBeans, which is pretty cool.

Answer 18

I use JProfiler and find it generally OK. However, the "dynamic toolkit" feature is terribly biased for small methods.

Answer 19

I am using TPTP profiler. the best feature that it can easily integrate into Eclipse, but the bad thing is that Eclipse is slower.

Answer 20

Definitely YourKit. It is the most intuitive and stable!

Answer 21

+1 for yourkit --- using 7.0 in dev windows in windows
I have not used JProfiler for a while - I can’t comment, since they could improve in the meantime.