Effective Java Profiling With Open Source Tools

Taken from: http://www.infoq.com/articles/java-profiling-with-open-source

In this article I will be going through some of the open source tools that are available. Some of these tools come with the JVM itself, while some are third party tools. I will start out with the simplest of the tools, and gradually move on to more sophisticated tools as the article progresses. The main objective is to enable you to extend your diagnostic toolbox, something that will most definitely come in handy when you application starts to perform strange, slow or not at all.