Project Atlantis Proposed for JDK Performance Monitoring and Analysis Improvement Experimentation

The thread "Call For Discussion: New Project: Atlantis" on the OpenJDK discuss mailing list discusses JC Beyler's proposal of an OpenJDK project called "Project Atlantis" that "would provide a venue to explore and incubate monitoring and performance analysis features that could be integrated into the Hotspot JVM and the JVM Tool Interface." This proposed project would include "working, evaluating, and incubating a Thread-Sanitizer implementation for Java."

Beyler's proposal provides background for this proposed project based on work done at Google:

The Google platform team has historically worked on providing new features, including monitoring hooks due to certain monitoring features not being available in a low-overhead, turned on-by-default manner. Therefore, for Google Java users, the platform team augmented or added mechanisms to assess various metrics such as but not limited to:

• Thread Sanitizer support for Java (see JDK-8208520) (though this one specifically is not a low-overhead one, sorry ;-))
• Lock contention profiles to better understand where threads are spending time in locks
• Heap dumping mechanisms to improve heap dump times for large heaps
• Efficient thread tagging to help filter profiling
• etc.

All of the above have added changes to the JDK in various forms and the Atlantis project proposes to investigate, in the open, how these changes could be made general enough to be pushed into the mainline, or should be dropped due to being too specific or could be done using other existing mechanisms.

That same proposal message is not much longer than the quotation above, but does add some details regarding "evaluation criteria" that would be used to determine which investigated features and improvements warranted a JEP for eventual integration into the JDK baseline.

The responses to the Project Atlantis proposal have generally been enthusiastic with a few key discussion points related to expressed concerns:

• Fragmentation of tools related to performance monitoring and analysis.
  • Ensuring that Java Flight Recorder is updated related to Project Atlantis improvements.
• Relationship of Project Atlantis and its mailing list to the OpenJDK Serviceability Group and its mailing list.
• Availability of interested and appropriate personnel to maintain Project Atlantis improvements merged into the JDK baseline.

Beyler provides a summary of the thread's questions and concerns. In the concluding portion of that summary, he writes:

... this project is an attempt to have a venue to create conversations about current internal systems or non-existent ones and that we can see what "sticks" and what doesn't; where it would "stick" potentially, what it would like and then how could be best push it forward with the support of the whole community.

There are several aspects of this proposal that intrigue me. Perhaps the most immediately relevant for me would be anything that could be done to make it easier to analyze large heap dumps. Jonathan Lu has interest in similar capability and writes, "I'm especially interested in the heap dumping part. It costs a lot to create, transfer, and analyze huge heap dump files for my applications."

Based on the initial proposal and discussion, it seems to me that Project Atlantis could be of great benefit to users of OpenJDK (and likely the numerous JDKs that will be based on OpenJDK).