Specifying profiling criteria

Prerequisites:

The following actions are all performed under the Profiling tab of the profiling configuration you created when you launched or attached to your application.

Specifying profiling sets and creating profiling filters enables you to specify the subset of information that you want to analyze. Profiling sets specify the type of data to collect, and filters ensure that only relevant details are channeled out to the views. Using filters is especially useful when speed and efficiency is critical: the less data there is, the less impact it has on the system, and the faster it can be collected.

Configuring the profiling criteria for an application is broken down into the following sections:

 

Configuring the profiling overview

  1. In your profiing configuration, under the Profiling tab, select the Overview tab.
  2. Click Add to add your own profiling set. The Add Profiling Set dialog window opens.
  3. Specify a name and a description for your profiling set. Click OK. A new profiling set is created in the Profiling set list.
  4. Select the newly created profiling set and click Edit. The Edit Profiling Set dialog opens.
  5. To specify the information you want collected, select the relevant check boxes. Refer to Profiling sets and available views to see which profiling sets should be enabled to generate the different views.
  6. Click Next.
  7. On the Edit Filters page, specify the filter set that you want applied by selecting from the Select a filter set list. You can use the Default set.
  8. Under Contents of selected filter set, click Add to add packages that you want to collect data for. The Add Filter dialog opens.
    Note: Certain classes will always be visible in the profiling views regardless of the filter settings. The profiling agent will always collect data for objects or classes that are associated with the task being examined while collecting data specific to the task. For example, you specify a filter to collect data for a single class MyUserClass, and specify another filter to exclude the java.lang.* classes. When an instance of MyUserClass is loaded though, it has an associated class definition that gets loaded. This class definition has an associated class object, which is in turn of type java.lang.Class. This results in data collection for the java.lang.Class in addition to the MyUserClass class.
    This behaviour applies to threads as well. The java.lang.Thread class will always show up in the Profiling views because the profiling agent tracks all running threads, and therefore, collects data for objects or classes associated with those threads.
  9. Specify the Package or Class, Method Name and select Include from the Rule list.
    Hint: You can use * as a wildcard when specifying the package or method names, e.g. org.eclipse.* or *.sample.myapplication
  10. Click OK. The filter criterion is added to the contents list.
  11. To exclude other existing packages from the filter contents list, click on Include under the Rule column for the package, and change it to Exclude.
  12. Click Finish.
  13. Click Apply to save the changes.
  14. Click Run to start profiling your application.

 

Configuring the profiling limits

You can specify the amount of data you want collected by specifying a limit by method invocations or a limit by time.

  1. In your profiing configuration, under the Profiling tab, select the Limits tab.
  2. To limit the data collected by method invocations select the Stop profiling after specified number of method invocations check box. Specify the number of method invocations in the input box provided.
  3. To limit the data collected by time, select the Stop profiling after specified amount of time check box. Specify the amount of time in seconds in the input box provided.

 

Configuring the profiling data destination

You can specify the project, and the monitor to use for your profiling session. You can also write the profiling data to a file.

  1. In your profiing configuration, under the Profiling tab, select the Destination tab.
  2. Specify the Profiling Project that you want to use for your profiling session.
  3. Specify the Monitor that you want to use.
  4. If you want to save the profiling data to a file, select the Send profiling data to a file and specify the file name in the Profiling file input box.
  5. Click Apply to save the changes.
  6. Click Run to start profiling your application.
Hint: When filtering, only the first applicable filter is applied. When you are specifying filters, ensure that you declare the most specific filter criteria first.

Related concepts
Overview of the Profiling Tool

Related tasks
Profiling an application
Setting profiling preferences