Java profiling on OSX

Not so long ago I needed to profile a small application to check why a simple WebDAV listing call using Slide took 20 seconds. It turned out to be a network IO problem caused by a blocking readline call on the response stream. I usually tend to use JProfiler for finding out these kind of things, because it is very good at what it does. But because it is a paying application and my company doesn't provide me with a license, I have to keep my eyes open for alternatives (you can't keep working with trial licenses and Mailinator addresses aren't allowed when registering).

So when the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project, TPTP in short, appeared on my radar thanks to DZone I decided to try it out. Since I'm using Eclipse as my primary Java IDE this profiling plugin seemed a perfect fit, but little did I know. In Eclipse I opened Help > Install New Software... and added the http://eclipse.org/tptp/updates/ URL as a new software site to download TPTP. After downloading, agreeing to some licenses and an Eclipse restart I was ready to use my newly acquired profiler, or ... maybe not.

I was getting all kinds of different errors, but mostly NullPointerExceptions and some Incompatible Platform messages. After some looking around it was StackOverflow to the rescue: even though TPTP is already at version 4.3 there still isn't a TPTP Agent Controller for OSX. You've gotta be kidding me! How is it possible that they leave such a large group of Java developers, the ones that use OSX, out in the cold. It gets even better, you can't even open the TPTP 4.3 release notes page in Safari without getting a Javascript pop with the message: Sorry but this page isn't currently viewable in Safari. WTF!

So my little excursion away from JProfiler came to a screeching halt and I had to return to my tried and trusted JProfiler once again. One day I'll have to convince the big cheeses to get me a license.

Update 9 september 2009: it looks like I'm not the only one complaining: Green's Opinion

Eclipse debug problem

Yesterday I had some strange debug problem in Eclipse on OSX. Whenever I tried to start a debug session I got the following error screen

Accompanying this error dialog were the following lines in the Eclipse Console view

Error [22] in gethostbyname() call!
err:: Invalid argument
Socket transport failed to init.
Transport dt_socket failed to initialize, rc = -1.
FATAL ERROR in native method: No transports initialized

After some Googling it seems that the cause is an incorrect network configuration. Since I recently had changed something in my hosts file, that was the first place I was going to look, certainly after trying to do ping localhost and not getting a response back.

A quick examination of my /etc/hosts file and adding the line

127.0.0.1 localhost

solved my debugging problems.