For a particular segment of Java code, I'd like to measure:
I'm a relative Java novice and am not familiar with how this might be achieved. I've been referred to JMX, however I'm not sure how that might be used, and JMX looks a bit 'heavy' for what I'm looking to do.
Ideally I'd like some measurement class that can be told what I would like to measure, with the option of calling a start()
method prior to a code segment and a stop()
method after. Relevant metrics would be logged to a file I specify.
For example:
import com.example.metricLogger;
metricLogger logger = new metricLogger();
logger.setLogPath(pathToLogFile);
logger.monitor(executionTime);
logger.monitor(memoryUsage);
logger.monitor(cpuLoad);
logger.start();
/* Code to be measured */
logger.stop();
Is there any standard/common/conventional way of achieving this in Java?
Such measurements are for one-off performance comparisons, and so I'm not looking for any in-production long-term monitoring processes.
I'm more than happy to be referred to tutorials or external examples and don't expect a full answer here. That said, if anything as simple as the above can be achieved a realistic example would go down really well.
Profiling may be an easier option since you don't require in-production stats. Profiling also doesn't require code modification. VisualVM (which ships w/ the JDK 1.6.06+) is a simple tool. If you want something more in-depth I'd go with Eclipse TPTP, Netbeans profiler, or JProfiler(pay).
If you want to write you own, consider the following:
Simple measurments like execution time can be done by "clocking" the section you're interested in:
long start = System.nanoTime(); // requires java 1.5
// Segment to monitor
double elapsedTimeInSec = (System.nanoTime() - start) * 1.0e-9;
You can use a similar technique to monitor memory via Runtime.getRuntime().*memory() methods. Keep in mind that tracking memory usage in a garbage collected environment is trickier than simple subtraction.
CPU load is hard to measure in Java, I typically stick with execution time and optimize the longer / repetitive sections