JVM profiler

NetBeans memory profiler, usefull when you need to understand how memory is handle by the jvm (thanks to Tor for the link).

Also recently read about that subject (JSR 174: Monitoring and Management Specification for the Java^TM Virtual Machine):

Monitoring and Management APIs: The java.lang.management package provides the interface for monitoring and managing the JVM. It provides access to information such as: number of classes loaded and threads running, memory consumption, garbage collection statistics, on-demand deadlock detection, and others.

Since Sun made significant improvements of the memory handling:

New in the J2SE Platform version 1.5 is a feature referred to here as ergonomics. The goal of ergonomics is to provide good performance from the JVM with a minimum of command line tuning. Ergonomics attempts to match the best selection of

• Garbage collector

• Heap size

• Runtime compiler

for an application.