Romain Guy's Blog

NetBeans 5.0 beta and its profiler

I remember a great presentation of NetBeans profiler during NetBeans Day before JavaOne 2005 and I know I wanted to try it ever since. I finally did with the release of NetBeans 5.0 beta and I know I'll use it a lot. If you follow my blogs you know I spend a lot of time writing heavy Swing/Java2D effects. That's why I could really use a good graphical profiler to help me spot performance bottlenecks in my code. I usually rely on System.currenTimeMillis() but it's rather tedious and somehow useful only when you already suspect a piece of code to be the culprit.

NetBeans Profiler may not be as extensive as, say, JProfiler or other dedicated tools. Nevertheless, it addresses my needs and provides me an effective and straightforward UI to quickly spot heavy CPU or memory usages. The feature I love the most is the ability to monitor and analyse an application running outside of NetBeans. This allows me to start old projects or projects I run in Eclipse and monitor them in NetBeans Profiler. I guess I will start using NetBeans a bit more to benefit from the Profiler's capacity to monitor only a fragment of your code.

And as you can see on the screenshot, the UI looks really great on my Windows XP box, especially on Mustang with the subpixel antialiasing.

Comments

• I see that you are still using Eclipse. So, perhaps you should try Eclipse profiler too. Take a look at http://eclipsecolorer.sourceforge.net/index_profiler.html

  PS: There is a patch required to run this profiler on Eclipse 3.1, but it is not that difficult to find it. ;-)

  Posted by: euxx on October 02, 2005 at 03:47 PM

• I did try it indeed but I prefer NetBeans'. I prefer its UI.

  Posted by: gfx on October 02, 2005 at 03:56 PM

• The window control icons (maximise, minimise etc) look like normal Windows ones. Is this true? Can the same be done for Linux?

  Posted by: stodge on October 03, 2005 at 12:01 PM

• What do you mean ?

  Posted by: gfx on October 03, 2005 at 01:39 PM

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