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Get hold a Yourkit distribution (I have used yjp-7.0.7.zip), extract it and get hold of the license key. The key is required to use the UI which is the only way to examine the profile output.
Let us assume the Yourkit distribution has been extracted to BASEDIR. Assuming you are running on Linux and using version 7.0.7, the profiling agent is at: BASEDIR/yjp-7.0.7/bin/linux-x86-32/libyjpagent.so This is the profiling agent which can be provided with the java commandline. To use yourkit on a cluster, the above file needs to be copied to a readable location on each of the nodes of the cluster. Lets assume that this location is CLUSTER_BASEDIR.
Usage
See http://yourkit.com/docs/index.jsp for detailed docs.
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Hprof is the Sun profiler which comes with the JDK. It has many options for CPU and memory profiling. A general observation though is that the profiling using the "sampling" option doesn't seem to be accurate and that profiling using "tracing" (cpu=times or cpu=old) option is accurate but very very slow.
Usage
See http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Programming/HPROF.html for all the gory details - skip to the next part of this section if you just want it to work but don't want the gory details.
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1. In eclipse, go to Help->Software update, add new update site: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/mat/0.8/update-site/
2. Follow the instruction to install memory analyzer. For detail, you can refer to http://www.eclipse.org/mat/downloads.php
3. Open perspective Memory Analysis, in the file menu, you will see a new entry "Open heap dump..."
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