Java Enterprise Best Practices

Don’t Use JVM Profiling Tools

JVM profiling tools are normally used during development to identify bottlenecks in running Java code. They are suitable for identifying bottlenecks in application subcomponents that run in individual JVMs. However, they usually impose a heavy overhead on the JVM. Therefore, they tend to be used infrequently because of the extra time needed to run an application while profiling, and because analyzing the results of the profile can be difficult.

JVM profiling tools do not provide absolute measurements of execution time. The heavy overhead makes the absolute times produced by a JVM profiler irrelevant. Instead, the relative times of execution between methods and threads are measured to provide a profile that can be analyzed to determine the program bottlenecks. Their heavy overheads make JVM profiling tools unsuitable for use as enterprise monitoring tools.