I’ve been looking around for a free, open source Java profiling tool today. I’m especially interested in finding something that integrates well with Eclipse. You’d think there’d be a lot of choices for something as widely useful as this, but I’m still trying to find something I like. The first stop today is the Extensible Java Profiler (EJP), which, if it lives up to its hype, should ultimately be a good choice. I’ve had a lot of trouble getting it to work, though.

EJP uses a native DLL (named tracer.dll for the Windows version) and that DLL needs to be installed in just the right spot. The EJP installation instructions suggest that as long as the directory containing tracer.dll is in your path, all will be well. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get it working until I copied tracer.dll into my C:\j2sdk1.4.1_02\jre\bin directory. The next snag I ran into was that the profiler was expecting to find a tracer.cfg file in my current working directory. This file doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere, but I did find a sample one in the EJP distribution and so I’m using that for now.

The current problem is that the log files that EJP produces while it’s running are just ginormous. I suspect that if there some hints about what to put in that filter.cfg file I might be able to slim those down. As it is, I think I’m going to have to read up on EJP’s tracer API, which I think will give more control over the profiling process (and hopefully reduce the size of those log files as a result).

Stay tuned…