LTTng » LTTng-UST

J9 VM instrumentation has 16k individual events. Latest UST changes improves the process startup time from about 180s down to 2-4s (depending if tracing is active or not). However, this is still far from the 200ms process startup time normally expected for J9 VM.

There are a couple of ways to improve things:

a) implement a pre-computed hash table and or radix tree within the probe provider. Given the tracepoint names within a provider are known statically, we could construct a data structure to access them efficiently after object compilation, generate C code to construct those structures, and generate an output object, which would be linked with the provider object to create the shared library. The hash table would fit for use-cases where events are enabled by name, and radix tree (or something similar) would be better suited for wildcards.

b) a simpler solution for the disabled tracing case might be to delay addition of tracepoints to the hash table until the moment this data structure is actually needed (lazy initialization).