Runtime Performance Distortion and Dilation for Applications Written in the Java Programming Language

Java profiling uses the Java Virtual Machine Tools Interface (JVMTI), which can cause some distortion and dilation of the run.

For clock-based profiling and hardware counter overflow profiling, the data collection process makes various calls into the JVM software, and handles profiling events in signal handlers. The overhead of these routines, and the cost of writing the experiments to disk will dilate the runtime of the Java program. Such dilation is typically less than 10%.

For synchronization tracing, data collection uses other JVMTI events, which causes dilation in proportion to the amount of monitor contention in the application.