The last post in our Profiling in Production series we covered instrumentation and sampling profilers. We talked about “resources of interest” but which ones are the most useful for diagnosing performance bottlenecks? The most commonly used resource is time. We’ve been deliberately vague about the concept of timing so far because when it comes to computers there’s actually two types of timing..

In this blog post we’re going to look at performance profiling. What it is and how it works. This is the first post in our series on Profiling in Production, by the end of the series you’ll have an understanding of how profilers work, which ones are safe and efficient in production, how to read and interpret the data they produce and finally, how to use this knowledge to keep on top of performance.

When TransferWise first started using Opsian’s Continuous Profiling platform they had a service with a peculiar and elusive performance problem, one that had stumped existing performance monitoring tools. This post covers the symptoms of the mysterious problem and how TransferWise used Opsian’s tools to track down and solve it.

The HotSpot JVM comes with a range of non-standard -XX: options, many of which have an impact on performance. One set are the family of so-called AllocatePrefetch options comprising: -XX:AllocatePrefetchStyle, -XX:AllocatePrefetchStepSize, -XX:AllocatePrefetchLines, -XX:AllocatePrefetchInstr, -XX:AllocatePrefetchDistance and -XX:AllocateInstancePrefetchLines. In this blog post you’ll learn the background behind why AllocatePrefetch is necessary and how it can help performance.

In this screencast we're going to show how to solve blocking and locking performance problems using the Opsian Continuous Profiling service

We’re pleased to announce that Opsian now supports Continuous Profiling on the GraalVM JVM - this means that GraalVM users now have access to the same always-on low-overhead performance data as users of OpenJDK-based builds.

In this video we will look at how Flame Graphs from Opsian's Continuous Profiling system can lead to a 25x increase in performance on an example system exhibiting CPU time problems

Part 2 of Opsian's interview with Aleksey Shipilëv we discuss his work with Shenandoah, the concurrent Garbage Collector for Java and the reasons why we're seeing a new wave of state-of-the-art concurrent Garbage Collectors

Opsian’s Richard Warburton had the pleasure of sitting down with Aleksey Shipilëv and getting his thoughts on a range of topics. In Part 1 of the interview, Aleksey and Richard discuss the current state of JDK updates.

You might be wondering what the second Gulf War, Persian poetry and 1950s psychology techniques have to do with scaling your platform and in this article we'll see how they each feed into a powerful technique for better understanding the performance of your software.