Don’t Trust Your Profiler: An Empirical Study on the Precision and Accuracy of Java Profilers
Humphrey Burchell, Octave Larose, Sophie Kaleba, Stefan Marr · 2023
To identify optimisation opportunities, Java developers often use sampling profilers that attribute a percentage of run time to the methods of a program. Even so these profilers use sampling, are probabilistic in nature, and may suffer for instance from safepoint bias, they are normally considered to be relatively reliable. However, unreliable or inaccurate profiles may misdirect developers in their quest to resolve performance issues by not correctly identifying the program parts that would benefit most from optimisations.