clj-async-profiler

clj-async-profiler is an embedded high-precision performance profiler for Clojure. clj-async-profiler presents the profiling results as an interactive flamegraph. You can navigate the flamegraph, query it, change parameters and adapt the results for easier interpretation.

clj-async-profiler is based upon async-profiler which is a low overhead sampling profiler for Java.

Why use clj-async-profiler?

Compared to other profiling tools, clj-async-profiler has several pronounced strong points to make it your primary go-to profiler.

1. High precision. Historically, many Java profilers suffered from an issue called safepoint bias. It meant that they produced skewed and incorrect results when profiling certain code, and hence you would focus on optimizing already fast parts of your programs while the actual slow parts remained slow to the profiler. clj-async-profiler doesn't have this problem.
2. Low overhead. With its single-digit percentage overhead, clj-async-profiler is suitable to be used on production servers to obtain the performance profile in real production scenarios.
3. Embeddable. Adding the profiler is as easy as appending a single dependency. It is convenient both during development and when profiling in production.
4. Programmatically controllable. Again, in production scenarios, being able to drive the profiler from your application code enables multiple interesting usage patterns, like starting the profiler on schedule, or as a reaction to some event.
5. Convenient presentation. Flamegraphs as profile representation are very descriptive and demonstrative. The underlying raw data is in plain text which makes it malleable to extra processing and transformation.
6. Not just CPU profiling. clj-async-profiling also supports profiling of allocations (shows which parts of you code allocate the most objects/memory), locks, context switches, and other events supported by your operating system.