I have an application, which I have re-factored so that I believe it is now faster. One can't possibly feel the difference, but in theory, the application should run faster. Normally I would not care, but as this is part of my project for my master's degree, I would like to support my claim that the re-factoring did not only lead to improved design and 'higher quality', but also an increase in performance of the application (a small toy-thing - a train set simulation).

I have toyed with the latest VisualVM thing today for about four hours but I couldn't get anything helpful out of it. There isn't (or I haven't found it) a way to simply compare the profiling results taken from the two versions (pre- and post- refactoring).

What would be the easiest, the most straightforward way of simply telling the slower from the faster version of the application. The difference of the two must have had an impact on the performance. Thank you.