YourKit in Production

Question

I have recently downloaded a trial version of YourKit and after playing with it for a while it looks great, but I am concerned about running it in the production environment. Previous profilers I have used have put unacceptable overhead on the servers.

Does anyone know the typical overhead of the YourKit software? Or has anyone had any problems running YourKit in a production environment?

I am running YourKit for Java. The server I am profiling is RedHat running JBoss 4.

Answer 1

I have used yourkit in production but on a tomcat server. It works pretty well and we didn't noticed any major performance overheads.

We had many instances of Tomcat server running behind a load balancer. So we put yourkit on one of the servers and things work out pretty well.

Answer 2

For everbody wondering: Initially we already have had really strange performance issues, which we couldn't place for quite a while.

So we installed yourkit on our production servers (Tomcat) and disabled the telemetry (disableexceptiontelemetry,disablestacktelemetry) as advised. Then we started tuning the Garbage Collection but this did not seem to make any difference. Still from time to time randomly one of the servers would start to show real bad performance. Sometimes it did recovered by itself, more often a restart was the only solution.

After a lot of debugging & log-reading we found some very long periods of reference checking concerning the JNI Weak References in the gc log. The probes of yourkit seemed to mess with that somehow.

After disabling the probes as well (builtinprobes=none) everything got back to normal. The tuning of the gc config had solved our initial performance problems already, but leaving the yourkit probes active created a new issue, which was so similar, that we couldn't tell them apart.

See here for more details:
Java G1 GC Processing Reference objects works slow

Answer 3

I have used Yourkit on JBOSS and Mule servers in production. What I felt is that when the load increases , it is throwing out of memory error. Then we stopped using it in production and we use it only for local testing.

And we use Jconsole in production server to monitor server resources like CPU , memory,Threads.

It is really helpful.