Bytestacks

A tool to turn the output of -XX:+TraceBytecodes (a JDK debug-only feature to print every bytecode executed by the interpreter) into a simple stack format, and a script to turn that into flame graphs showing what happened during program execution, bytecode-by-bytecode:

Flame graph generated from running a Hello World program on 9-ea+157

Who/what is this for?

This is a diagnostic tool I've developed and used to visualize what is going on at startup at a high granularity. Since it relies on a very verbose and slow debug option it's not by any means a good estimator of how long time things actually take.

As such, this is more a diagnostic tool than a profiler, but a tool that has served us well to disentangle various startup dependencies and inefficiencies in the JDK itself - and been a valuable aid in diagnosing a number of startup regressions.

Why?

Most profiling tools either have a blind spot when it comes to capturing what happens during the very early initialization of a JVM, e.g., agent based instrumentation, JFR etc, or they are native profiling tools that would attribute everything to "something in the interpreter".

Requirements

Usage

Going deeper...

Questions/feedback?

References