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"Tracing" tracks request execution across multiple frameworks and services. "Profiling" looks at what proportion of a specific resource (eg time or CPU time or allocation) that methods use in an application. You typically use traces to find where requests are being delayed most; you typically use profiles to find where you can improve the efficiency of an application. The common workflow is to use traces to see where to focus your profiling analyses, then profile that part of the system to identify code or configuration improvements.

These two techniques, tracing and profiling, assist each other yet are rarely integrated. But profiling also let's you infer what is executing at particular times, which would be very useful for tracing. Now the Elastic Java agent team (in which I currently work) have made available their open source integration of these two technologies (called inferred spans) as a standalone component. It's pretty cool to use profile samples to help trace request flow in this automated way!

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

• Open source OpenTelemetry extension for generating spans via profiling (instead of instrumentation) is now available as a standalone component
• Odd analysis suggesting that later JVMs are spending more time inspecting a higher number of strings while eliminating fewer duplicates from memory
• Improved escape analysis on try-with-resource code from Java 22

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools

• Open source OpenTelemetry extension for generating spans via profiling instead of instrumentation
• Lincheck framework for testing concurrent algorithms on the JVM
• A distributed spring based application with observability and performance issues built-in, designed to let you investigate and find and solve those performance issues

Articles

• Finding Java's Hidden Performance Traps (Victor Reneta/Devoxx UK)
• Pushing Java to the Limits: Processing a Billion Rows in under 2 Seconds (Roy Van Rijn/Devoxx UK)
• Practical Performance Analysis (Simone Bordet/Devoxx)

Jack Shirazi

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