perfix

Pretty basic profiling tool for JVM's

Highlights:

• Meant for development time (after process stops, data is gone).
• Minimal memory footprint (agent ~ 1 mb).
• Easy setup (2 commandline arguments for java process)
• Minimalistic web interface.
• Execution time is measured in nanoseconds
• No manual instrumentation necessary using loadtime bytecode manipulation (javassist).
• No special jdbc configuration necessary (ie no wrapped jdbc driver).
• The agent is also the server (ui backend).

Usage

• Agent that instruments loaded classes: -javaagent:/perfix.jar
• Include classes for instrumentation with -Dperfix.includes=com.project. ...etc (includes subpackages)
• Web page to report executed methods and sql query excutions:
  * #invocations
  * total execution time for the method in nanoseconds (this is also the sorting order)
  * average time in nanoseconds per method (= total/#invocations)
• The backend starts on port 2048 by default. Use -Dperfix.port=... to adjust.
• Start the UI using npm install followed by npm start. the UI starts on port 3000 by default.

roadmap

• Overhead (in method execution time) not clear yet. I wouldn't use it in production.
• Finish jdbc query logging (CallableStatement)
• Ability to dynamically turn off metrics to minimize cpu and memory overhead (when response time is below a set treshold)
• extend the user interface

DISCLAIMER:

This has only been tested on oracle java8 in spring-boot using tomcat web-container (and apache dbcp)

Javassist raises the following error:

WARNING: An illegal reflective access operation has occurred
WARNING: Illegal reflective access by javassist.util.proxy.SecurityActions (file:/Users/Shautvast/.m2/repository/org/javassist/javassist/3.26.0-GA/javassist-3.26.0-GA.jar) to method java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(java.lang.String,byte[],int,int,java.security.ProtectionDomain)
WARNING: Please consider reporting this to the maintainers of javassist.util.proxy.SecurityActions
WARNING: Use --illegal-access=warn to enable warnings of further illegal reflective access operations
WARNING: All illegal access operations will be denied in a future release

But it works at least up until java 15.

I cannot fix this issue, but I'm working to replace javassist as a dependency.