I needed to profile a Java application, and since we had a JProfiler floating license, I used it. JProfiler works well, although it’s pricey. I was googling for other Java profiling tools, and [stackoverflow.com](http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=visualvm) made mention of [jvisualvm](https://visualvm.dev.java.net/), which comes bundled with JDK 6 release 7. I noticed that on my Fedora 10 box, the java-1.6.0-openjdk package includes jvisualvm. None of my coworkers had heard of it.
JProfiler introduces a significant performance penalty into the code it profiles, whereas other tools including jvisualvm and YourKit have a much lower impact. I’m going to give jvisualvm a try, once I get the target environment set up properly with the new JDK.
UPDATE: jvisualvm won’t profile remote applications like JProfiler can. jvisualvm is not quite as easy to use, and I haven’t figured out how to get stack traces on the CPU and memory hot spots. Overall, I like the tool.
UPDATE 2: jvisualvm can be configured to give a stack trace of memory hot spots. I’ve learned that performance between the Java 1.5 and 1.6 jvms can be very different. I’ve learned that I can run ‘kill -3