Bug 134787

Could you please describe in more details how CPU snapshots comparison should look like? Do you have experience with any
other tool which supports this feature? It doesn't seem easy to compare two potentially different trees. Thanks.

Sure, thanks for asking.

The simplest thing I would expect would be a diff between the hotspot listing.  More interesting would a comparison of
trees which would be something like running a a tree-based diff algorithm and displaying the diff projected on one of
the trees.

Some tools that have such a feature:
dotTrace (see http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler/documentation/index.html (1st video))
Yourkit (see http://www.yourkit.com/features/index.jsp#cpu_compare_snapshots)
jProbe (see http://www.quest.com/jprobe/automate_report.aspx (They call is snapshot differencing))

Please let me know if I can answer any further.

Milestone cleanup: future->next

Integrated into 'main-golden', will be available in build *201206240002* on http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/ (upload may still be in progress)
Changeset: http://hg.netbeans.org/main-golden/rev/e35c29ef4150
User: Jiri Sedlacek <jis@netbeans.org>
Log: Initial implementation of #134787 - comparing CPU snapshots

Initial version implemented for 7.3:

 http://hg.netbeans.org/profiler-main/rev/e35c29ef4150
 http://hg.netbeans.org/profiler-main/rev/7896bf2e3e51

Integrated into 'main-golden', will be available in build *201206250002* on http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/ (upload may still be in progress)
Changeset: http://hg.netbeans.org/main-golden/rev/7896bf2e3e51
User: Jiri Sedlacek <jis@netbeans.org>
Log: Working Go To Source and other fixes for #134787 - Compare CPU Snapshots

Additional changes implemented by http://hg.netbeans.org/profiler-main/rev/02054b98090d.