I am discovering that trying to find a memory leak with Eclipse is like trying to give a cat a bath — some people may have luck, but for the majority of us it is a time consuming frustrating experience that doesn’t do anyone much good. First I tried the Eclipse Memory Analyzer, but the files produced by the memory dump were way too big for it to open.

So I tried the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools. Installing it the old fashioned way didn’t work, so I downloaded the all-in-one package. that seemed to work OK, but now it throws a JVMTI error that doesn’t seem to have a solution in any of the usual places on the net (although there are plenty of posts about problems with JVMTI).

I tried using the Java Visual VM memory profiler that comes with the JDK, but that apparently can’t see inside the JVM that Eclipse launches. I was able to launch the Jade container from the command line, but getting all the various libraries needed to to run my code properly is proving to be a royal pain in the butt. Almost two days spent on what should be a relatively trivial problem in this day and age.

Rumor has it that NetBeans has a much better profiling capability that Eclipse, so I guess that’s my next step. I’ve downloaded it, now I guess I’ll have to learn how to use it. What a pain.