Profiling an app involves looking at an apps performance and resource usage over time. This is an essential step to be able to tune an application and the app server (if deployed to one) so that it can run optimally.
DevX.com have a great article this week explaining the JVM’s support for profiling tools, memory spaces in the heap, and the Java 5.0 JConsole utility to examine heap usage. It’s a good introduction to profiling, and it would be great if they could follow this with a more detailed article describing typical problems to look for and how to tune your app and VM to avoid the problems.