Understanding Request Latency with Profiling

Richard Startin`, a Senior Software Engineer at `Datadog`, shares his experience on using the Java wallclock profiler to improve request latency in Java applications. He highlights the limitations of traditional profiling approaches and introduces `async-profiler`, which he worked on to help address this issue. The article explains how `async-profiler` can be used to create a flame graph that shows a complete picture of CPU time, even if the bottleneck is not directly related to CPU usage. It also discusses the challenges of sampling threads in a high-thread-count environment and introduces a new thread filter approach that only samples threads with an active trace context set up by the tracer. The article concludes with examples of how to use `async-profiler` to investigate and fix performance issues, including increasing the heap size and adding more vCPUs.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.