Lightweight Java Profiling with Partial Safepoints and Incremental Stack Tracing
Peter Höfer, David Gnedt, Hanspeter Mössenböck · 2015
Sampling profilers are popular because of their low and adjustable overhead and because they do not distort the profile by modifying the application code. A typical sampling profiler periodically suspends the application threads, walks their stacks, and merges the resulting stack traces into a calling context tree. Java virtual machines offer a convenient interface to accomplish this, but rely on safepoints, a synchronization mechanism that requires all threads to park in a safe location. However, a profiler is primarily interested in the running threads, and waiting for all threads to reach a safe location significantly increases the overhead. In most cases, taking a complete stack trace is also unnecessary because many stack frames remain unchanged between samples.