Profiling JVM Applications in Production

Sasha Goldshtein, Sela Group

Abstract: 

Many profilers, such as JVisualVM and jstack, will simply lie to your face about which call stacks are hottest and where your bottlenecks lie. Profiling in production environments has even more challenges, because you have to carefully manage overhead, account for other processes running on the system, and choose non-invasive tools that don't require an application restart.

We will build a simple checklist for verifying JVM application performance, and finding the area to focus on in a closer investigation. Then, we will experiment with two approaches for CPU profiling on Linux: the perf multi-tool, combined with perf-map-agent, and the async-profiler project, an innovative tool that brings perf together with traditional JVM profiling techniques. We will visualize stack traces using flame graphs, and understand where the CPU bottlenecks lie, through a series of hands-on labs.

In the second half of this workshop, we will talk about more complicated scenarios: diagnosing errors when opening files, tracing database queries, monitoring system I/O load, understanding the reasons for excessive garbage collection, figuring out why threads are blocked off-CPU, and more. Some of these tasks can be approached using perf, but others require a bleeding-edge technology—BPF and BCC.

Pre-Reading List:

Prerequisites, Skills, and Tools:

  • Familiarity with shell scripting and basic commands
  • Understanding of OS concepts such as processes, threads, memory
  • Basic understanding of the JVM code execution model, GC, interactions with native code.

Sasha Goldshtein, Sela Group

Sasha Goldshtein is the CTO of Sela Group, a Microsoft MVP and Regional Director, Pluralsight and O'Reilly author, and international consultant and trainer. Sasha is the author of two books and multiple online courses, and a prolific blogger. He is also an active open source contributor to projects focused on system diagnostics, performance monitoring, and tracing—across multiple operating systems and runtimes. Sasha authored and delivered training courses on Linux performance optimization, event tracing, production debugging, mobile application development, and modern C++. Between his consulting engagements, Sasha speaks at international conferences world-wide.

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BibTeX
@conference {212987,
author = {Sasha Goldshtein},
title = {Profiling {JVM} Applications in Production},
year = {2018},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}