Most likely, you will not need to configure profiling manually. Please first consider the automated ways to enable profiling in your J2SE, J2EE application or applet.

Step 1: Add VM option '-agentpath'

Add -agentpath:<full agent library path> VM option to the command line of Java application to be profiled.

The agent library path depends on your OS:

Windows, 32-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>\bin\win32\yjpagent.dll
Windows, 64-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>\bin\win64\yjpagent.dll
Mac OS X	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/mac/libyjpagent.jnilib
Linux x86, 32-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/linux-x86-32/libyjpagent.so
Linux x86, 64-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/linux-x86-64/libyjpagent.so
Solaris SPARC, 32-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/solaris-sparc-32/libyjpagent.so
Solaris SPARC, 64-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/solaris-sparc-64/libyjpagent.so
Solaris x86, 32-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/solaris-x86-32/libyjpagent.so
Solaris x86, 64-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/solaris-x86-64/libyjpagent.so
HP-UX IA64, 32-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/hpux-ia64-32/libyjpagent.so
HP-UX IA64, 64-bit Java	-agentpath:<profiler directory>/bin/hpux-ia64-64/libyjpagent.so

If you have copied the profiler agent library file from the profiler installation directory to another location, please change the path accordingly.

You can find examples of startup scripts for your platform in <profiler directory>/samples

To check that Java can load the profiler agent, invoke the following command that prints a description of agent parameters:

java -agentpath:<full agent library path>=help

If JVM reports an error, refer to the knowledge base article for troubleshooting.

Step 2: (Optional) Specify startup options

You can specify additional startup options. In most cases there's no need to use them.

To profile a J2EE server (especially JBoss!), specify startup option delay=10000

The options are comma separated: -agentpath:<full agent library path>[=<option>, ...].

Examples:

java -agentpath:c:\\yourkit\\yjpagent.dll FooClass
java -agentpath:c:\\yourkit\\yjpagent.dll=alloceach=10,allocsizelimit=1000000 FooClass