Today tuning has evolved to the rank of "science", first and foremost because it's supported by a vast collection of tools which can help you to systematically fix your performance issues.
So, before entering the tuning arena, we will install some nice software on your machine which will be used across the examples of this book. As we are embracing the open source philosophy, we have chosen to focus on high quality open source software, so your only investment will be the price paid for this book. You can still consider vendor alternatives, which often provide sales support and engineering staff trained to make the software have a less-daunting road to getting up and running.
In the first part of this chapter, we will learn about profiling the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), focusing on VisualVM, a powerful tool developed by Sun engineers.
In the next section of the chapter, we will learn about the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform suite (Eclipse TPTP) which...