Tracing the root cause of a performance issue requires a lot of patience, experience, and focus. It’s so hard that we sometimes attempt to guess by trying out tentative fixes, but that usually results in frustration, messy code, and a considerable waste of time and money. This talk explains how to correctly zoom in on a performance bottleneck using three levels of profiling: distributed tracing, metrics, and method profiling. After we learn to read the JVM profiler output as a flame graph, we explore a series of bottlenecks typical for backend systems, like connection/thread pool starvation, invisible aspects, blocking code, hot CPU methods, lock contention, and Virtual Thread pinning, and we learn to trace them even if they occur in library code you are not familiar with. Attend this talk and prepare for the performance issues that will eventually hit any successful system.
