IntelliJ IDEA 2022.3 Help

Introduction to profiling

Profiling is a type of runtime analysis that operates on large amounts of runtime data and gives you a birds-eye view of what is happening inside a process. The collected data relates to various aspects of program operation, such as CPU usage, memory allocation, and interaction between the threads.

Profiling can be instantaneous, like capturing a memory snapshot, or long-running. For example the CPU profiler can collect data during arbitrarily large periods of time, like hours or even days of program operation.

When is profiling helpful?

Profiling tools help you:

  • Identify bugs, bottlenecks and diagnose poor performance

  • Identify hot spots and opportunities for optimization (not necessarily related to a performance problem)

  • Assess or compare the performance of different solutions

  • Get a better understanding of how a program operates under the hood

Supported profiling types

IntelliJ IDEA profiler is not a single tool but rather a suite of related tools. They all have their own area of application:

  • CPU and memory live charts – allow you to monitor a process in real time. This type of diagnostics gives you the resource consumption metrics over time and may be useful as a monitoring tool or, in the case of a performance problem, a starting point for further investigation.

  • CPU and allocation profiling – allow you to see how CPU and memory resources were utilized during a particular period of time. This may be useful for detecting hot code, opportunities for optimization, or just discovering how a program operates at runtime.

  • Memory snapshots – allow you to analyze how memory is used at a particular instant. This data is useful for investigating memory-related issues.

  • Thread dumps - allow you to see the program state at a particular instant. The produced data captures the state of all threads. This may be useful, for example, to examine an unresponsive application.

Last modified: 05 September 2022