JPMT: A Java Performance Monitoring Tool

This paper describes our Java Performance Monitoring Toolkit (JPMT), which is developed for detailed analysis of the behavior and performance of Java applications. JPMT represents internal execution behavior of Java applications by event traces, where each event represents the occurrence of some activity, such as thread creation, method invocation, and locking contention. JPMT supports event filtering during and after application execution. Each event is annotated by high-resolution performance attributes, e.g., duration of locking contention and CPU time usage by method invocations. JPMT is an open toolkit, its event trace API can be used to develop custom performance analysis applications. JPMT comes with an event trace visualizer and a command-line event trace query tool for scripting purposes. The instrumentation required for monitoring the application is added transparently to the user during run-time. Overhead is minimized by only instrumenting for events the user is interested in and by careful implementation of the instrumentation itself