jvisialvm comes with the JDK, I'd start there with profiling: http://visualvm.java.net/profiler.html http://visualvm.java.net/profiler.html Edit: Adding, I'd

jvisialvm comes with the JDK, I'd start there with profiling: http://visualvm.java.net/profiler.html http://visualvm.java.net/profiler.html Edit: Adding, I'd set some judicial breakpoints in the hot spot areas identified through profiling along with some System.out.println's (or better dump to a flat file database, SQL can be used to work wonders for analysis even for flat file data).