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You most likely know Java has an agent option (-javaagent). Maybe you've had a go at building your own agent (I covered agent basics in a recent newsletter). Perhaps you've tried attaching to a JVM too, after it has started. But you've probably found that building your own robust full featured agent is too much work. Wouldn't it be nice if someone handled all the complexities of classloading, async comms, etc, and just left you the easy work of instrumenting the specific thing you want to instrument?

Now Elastic has done exactly that. (Note that I currently work on the Elastic APM Java agent). By providing a simple plugin capability to the open source Elastic APM Java agent, you can now essentially build your own fully robust dedicated agent with very little effort! I think that's pretty cool!

Now on to all the usual newsletter list of links, tips, tools, news and articles, and as usual I've extracted all the tips into this month's tips page

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news

• New -XX:GCCardSizeInBytes in JVM 18, with an explanation of what it's for and the tradeoffs in tuning it
• seek pagination is much more efficient than offset pagination
• Performance myths - small code optimizations rarely make any real difference unless they are architectural changes
• Everything about Java 16+ Metaspace

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools

• StackTrace class for providing additional information about the life cycle of a resource, or adding simple monitoring you can run in production
• Troubleshooting Metaspace
• Linux Extended BPF (eBPF) Tracing Tools
• If you need to delve in to ultra low latency or maximize throughput, you need to look at how the CPU is being used by your app, and this talk will help

Articles

• Network data transmission and compression in Java (Eric J. Bruno/Java Magazine)
• How Class Data Sharing Can Speed up Your Application Startup (Rudy De Busscher/DevoxxUK)
• Create your own instrumentation with the Java Agent Plugin (Jack Shirazi/Elastic)

Jack Shirazi

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