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eBPF based continuous profiling of your system has been possible for years, but it's only now that we can see it easily producing Java stack traces from a simple install. The donation of Elastic's mature eBPF continuous profiling agent to OpenTelemetry means that on any Unix system, for a 1% overhead, you can see stack traces of all Java apps including both native and Java stack entries. (Note I currently work in the Elastic Java agent team). You also get other language specific traces.

Because this will become easy, low cost, and very useful, this OpenTelemetry eBPF profiling agent will become widespread. But while it's very useful, at least for now this is limited tech. That's because this profiling is currently only CPU profiling. The other types of common profiling that we need for our Java apps - wall clock, lock, contention, allocation, GC, IO - are not available (yet). It's fantastically useful tech for identifying some types of problems, but it's not a replacement for general profilers. Nevertheless it's definitely something you should know about.

For a look at how those eBPF profiles can be used, see our first news item below ... and continue to all the usual newsletter list of links, tips, tools, news and articles. And as usual I've extracted all the Java performance and memory tips into this month's tips page

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news

• Profiling a Java application using eBPF and OpenTelemetry
• Identifying the cause of a deadlock with virtual threads can be challenging
• Exploring the JVM memory management - nice overview of the various spaces and garbage collector algorithms

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools

• LatenSeer is a modeling framework for estimating end-to-end latency distributions in microservice-based web applications
• Perses (attempt to create) an open source standard for visualization and dashboards for metrics monitoring
• -XX:StartFlightRecording:help is a useful option to understand the very many options for JFR

Articles

• Handling concurrent access to shared resources in Java (Sebastian Konieczek/JAVAPRO)
• Harnessing Exotic Hardware: Charting the Future of JVM Performance (Monica Beckwith/InfoQ)
• JEP 466 Explained: Class-File API (Mala Gupta, Rafael Winterhalter/IntelliJ IDEA)

Jack Shirazi

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