Gregg Sporar's Blog

I Am Walking

Milestone 2 of version 6 of the NetBeans IDE was released last week. A detailed list of new features is available here. Along with the release of the IDE milestone, there is also a Milestone 2 of version 6 of the NetBeans Profiler. The Profiler milestone has two new features: support for load testing and a heap walker. I have not had time to experiment with the load testing stuff yet - but it looks interesting; more details are available here.

I have experimented with the heap walker, though. For a long time now the NetBeans Profiler has had the ability to watch memory allocations on the heap and report information about those allocations. It uses instrumentation to do that, which is a very powerful technique for finding some types of memory leaks. As I pointed out in my JavaOne session, however, sometimes you need to walk the heap. For some types of memory leaks, it is the easiest way to track them down.

And now the NetBeans Profiler has a heap walker:

Or it has the beginnings of one. This feature is still very much under development and is not yet complete. The profiler team would like your feedback, so send it to feedback@profiler.netbeans.org.

As evidence of their interest in feedback, the profiler team even created a separate demo version of the heap walker - no NetBeans required. You can use web start to run it from here. Note that this is only a demo for the purpose of gathering feedback. To prevent people from thinking that this a supported version or anything like that, it is time-bombed (it will only work for the next six weeks) and it cannot read a heap snapshot that is larger than 20mb.

If you do not want to be constrained by those limitations, just download milestone 2 of the NetBeans IDE and milestone 2 of the NetBeans Profiler. Neither of them has any limits :-)

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