NetBeans Profiler Testimonials

• Gregor Kronenberger

  I love the profiler in NetBeans thank you so much for creating it. It is so easy to use and useful at the same time....

My Master's thesis involved extensive use of an in-house simulator, written in Java. Since I added quite a few extensions to it and had a large number of simulations to run, I needed to optimize its
performance. We had two problems with the simulator: during extended runs, we would quickly run out of memory and the performance of our networking component was below par.

We quickly found the memory leak using the memory performance monitor. One of our statistics collectors was allocation a lot of hashtables and never deleting them, keeping a reference to the first run's statistic in the last run.

Our network performance problem was not in our Java program at all, but rather the related C++ program that was communicating with our Java simulator. Looking at the profiler output, we noticed that we spent most of our time waiting for data. We optimized this by sending and receiving requests in batches.

...Once again, you guys have made my life a lot nicer.

• Michael Coté - Software Industry Analyst

  There are several free profilers available. Many of them are difficult to set up and not well documented. The NetBeans Profiler is neither of those, however: setting it up is easy, and the community around it is responsive enough to fill in any holes in documentation and fix bugs. I had a fantastic experience using it.

The only "problem" with it is that it's in NetBeans instead of Eclipse. I say problem because I was and am an Eclipse coder. I haven't used NetBeans for years. However, the NetBeans profiler is so good that we ignored that problem and went through downloading and setting up NetBeans to use it.

Put another way, the NetBeans Profiler was the reason I started using NetBeans again. While I didn't use it for development, I downloaded and installed it, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think of trying out NetBeans again for development.

• Valere Dejardin

  I had developped an application with Java Studio Creator 1, that was running fine under Tomcat 5.0. But customers complained about low performances. So I decided to profile it: I created a new project with NB 5.0, pasted the sources, added all needed jars to projects, set my external Tomcat 5.0 as target. (By the way all this process went very smoothly). A simple "Run" and my application started, NB5 rocks!
Then I profiled my application, choosed "Analyse Performance", and then played with it until I find the root cause (that was due to my poor knowledge of JSF lifecycle, my SQL request were executed twice). Great tool!

• Michael Nascimento

  The NetBeans profiler is great, especially for profiling external processes, such as an application server. The required setup is minimum and it makes it very easy to diagnose performance and memory consumption problems. Definitely a must-have tool!

• Charles Lamb

  I'd heard about NetBeans in a couple of places. And recently I saw a blog entry on Dynamic Bytecode Instrumentation that NetBeans uses for profiling. That finally pushed me over the edge to try it out in the hopes that I'd be able to finally do some profiling on the Solaris x86 box.
NetBeans is easy enough to download and install (netbeans). Without a lot of trouble I was able to get it working on a simple JE app and produced some profiles. The debugger seems to work OK too. And hey, it interfaces with CVS and I can do side-by-side source comparisons. So I guess I have something that does everything I need in one package and runs on Solaris x86.
Eclipse certainly is a pretty good package, and a lot of effort that has gone into it. Personally, I find NetBeans just a little bit more approachable and manageable so I give it the edge there.