Evaluating the accuracy of Java profilers

Abstract

Performance analysts profile their programs to find methods that are worth optimizing: the "hot" methods. This paper shows that four commonly-used Java profilers (xprof , hprof , jprofile, and yourkit) often disagree on the identity of the hot methods. If two profilers disagree, at least one must be incorrect. Thus, there is a good chance that a profiler will mislead a performance analyst into wasting time optimizing a cold method with little or no performance improvement.