A Study of Java Microbenchmark Tail Latencies

Sen He, In Kee Kim, Wei Wang

Abstract: As Java microbenchmarks are great at profiling the performance of essential code elements, they are widely adopted for Java performance testing. Performance testing using Java microbenchmarks is composed of two phases: the warmup phase and the steady phase. Usually, testing results from the warmup phase are discarded because of the highly fluctuating performance caused by the optimization of Java Virtual Machine. The performance results collected during the steady phase are used for performance evaluation as they are assumed to be more stable. However, according to our study, severe performance fluctuations also occur during the steady phase, which leads to long tail latencies. Long tail latencies constitute a big problem in modern Java systems (of course, other systems and applications) as they hurt the user experience by prolonging the overall execution time. In this paper, we extensively evaluated the long tail performance of 586 Java microbenchmarks from 30 Java systems. The evaluation results show that, for 38% of the benchmarks in steady phase, their 99%tile execution times are over 30% higher than their median execution times. In the worst-case scenario, the 99%ile performance is 659 times higher than the median performance. Furthermore, the 95%ile execution times are above 30% higher than the median execution times for 11% of the steady phase benchmarks.