Maven - Profiling web applications

Question

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has found any plugins that attach a profiler to a JVM to automatically monitor performance during a unit or integration test. I would like to correlate performance to a particular page view and then drill down into all the methods invoked, memory used, run time, etc.

Does Yourkit or JBoss Profiler support these options or is it even possible?

Thanks, Walter

Answer 1

A quick search on Google allowed me to find this: maven-yourkit-plugin . Never tried it myself though.

Answer 2

This blog by velo from Sonatype describes how to profile your tests using Maven.

It configures the surefire plugin to point to the yourkit installation, then configure the surefire plugin to use the yourkit agent dll:

<profile>
  <!-- http://www.yourkit.com/docs/80/help/agent.jsp -->
  <id>yourkit-profile</id> 
  <properties>
    <yourkit.home>C:\Arquivos de programas\YourKit Java Profiler 8.0.13</yourkit.home>
  </properties>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <argLine>-agentpath:"${yourkit.home}\bin\win32\yjpagent.dll"</argLine>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</profile>

Later in the same blog it describes how to configure the build to use the API to take memory snapshots. That should allow you to do the correlation you described.

Answer 3

You might want to first try using the right performance instrumentation and measurement approach before worrying about an actual maven plug-in.

http://williamlouth.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/junit-performance-testing-instrumentation-and-assertion/