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I have recently had the pleasant experience of using the Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool (see http://www.eclipse.org/mat/). It has some really compelling capabilities and ease of using them as compared to many other tools in this space. Unfortunately, it is built on the Eclipse RCP rather than on NetBeans, but it is available as a standalone application independent of the IDE (but still using the Eclipse RCP, much like VisualVM and NetBeans' relationship). It seems that both NetBeans and VisualVM both should do one or more of the following: 1) Provide a plug-in that makes it *really* easy to start up the Memory Analyzer Tool (and possibly other external heap analyzers as well) with a heap dump that has been captured for the target process. 2) Integrate some of the capabilities of the Memory Analyzer Tool into NetBeans' memory profiler. Most especially I'd like to see the ability to compute the retained heap beneath a set of objects in the histogram -- based on the entire object graph below the objects, not just the objects themselves. This is a critical capability.
I submitted this as VisualVM issue 230 as well.
1) As described in VisualVM issue, we will not do it. 2) is duplicate of #83106 *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 83106 ***
Rejecting (1) out of hand seems silly given the relative ease of doing something helpful (e.g. a simple configurable command line handoff) and the low likelihood that other heap analysis tool communities will bother with a NetBeans or VisualVM integration (much less both, which would be appropriate here). See comments on the Visual VM issue as well. As for (2), the Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool has more features than just retained heap sizes missing from the NetBeans memory profiler. I don't believe the NetBeans profiler has the ability to quickly find and collate all the shortest paths to GC roots for a whole bucket in the histogram either. Or did I miss that? That's another key feature. Overall the NetBeans memory profiler team should give this tool a serious look and do some hard thinking about what they're missing.