Motivation

Motivation

It's a well known deficiency of most existing sampling Java profilers that their collection of stack traces has to happen at a safe point. This is the case for profilers such as the visualvm sampling profiler, which uses the SUN/Oracle management agent to gather its stack traces. The problem with this approach is that it introduces both a sample bias since not every point in the program is a safepoint and also that it introduces an overhead of how long it takes the JVM to reach a safepoint.

Honest Profiler gets around this problem by having its own sampling agent that uses UNIX Operating System signals and an API designed for the Oracle Performance Studio product in order to efficiently and accurately profile.