jProf Help

Overview

jProf is designed to help java developers identify problems in their applications and assess whether improvements are effective, i.e. it's a profiler. The profiler can provide information in the following areas:-

Memory usage and allocation on a per class basis
Garbage collection efficiency, as measured against the total available heap
Thread contention, as measured by contended monitor waits
Method utilisation, as measured by method timings and invocation paths.

Further information is provided on class implementation details by providing a listing for each class used in a given profiling run.

Installation Structure
jProf
   |___bin           Contains the shellscript/batch file used to invoke jProf and the application .class files.
   |___Help        Contains this help file.
   |___Images     Contains jProf images.
   |___lib            Contains vendor jar files and the jProf shared objects.
   |___Results     Creation point for output HTML.
   |___xml          Creation point for output XML.

Currently the output of the profiler is a generated XML file, which is post-processed to yield HTML. The HTML can be viewed from within the GUI or any HTML3.2 compliant browser, eg Netscape Communicator. Future enhancements are planned to include an interface for interrogating the XML and generating charts/graphs to graphically illustrate a number of measurements.

The jProf GUI is designed to be simple to use.The functionality and purpose of each tab are described here.

Authors: Gary Pennington and Rob Watson