Improving Garbage Collection Observability with Performance Tracing
Claire Huang, Stephen Michael Blackburn, Zixian Cai · 2023
Debugging garbage collectors for performance and correctness is notoriously difficult. Among the arsenal of tools available to systems engineers, support for one of the most powerful, tracing, is lacking in most garbage collectors. Instead, engineers must rely on counting, sampling, and logging. Counting and sampling are limited to statistical analyses while logging is limited to hard-wired metrics. This results in cognitive friction, curtailing innovation and optimization.