Java workloads are becoming more and more prominent on various computing devices. Understanding the behavior of a Java workload which includes the interaction between the application and the virtual machine (VM), is thus of primary importance during performance analysis and optimization. Moreover, as contemporary software projects are increasing in complexity, automatic performance analysis techniques are indispensable. This paper proposes an off-line methodlevel phase analysis approach for Java workloads that consists of three steps. In the first step, the execution time is computed for each method invocation. Using an off-line tool, we subsequently analyze the dynamic call graph (that is annotated with the method invocations’ execution times) to identify method-level phases. Finally, we measure performance characteristics for each of the selected phases. This is done using hardware performance monitors. As such, our approach allows for linking microprocessor-level information a...