Spring Boot Container takes up to 4x longer with APM agent

We are deploying dockerized spring boot apps to Amazon ECS.

With the APM agent enabled, it takes up to 4x longer to start the application.

Without APM agent:

Started ReportingApplicationKt in 17.294 seconds (JVM running for 18.426)

With APM Agent:

Started ReportingApplicationKt in 68.718 seconds (JVM running for 72.722)

Spring Boot Version 2.1.x (latest) Kotlin Version 1.3.41 (latest) Docker Version 18.06 APM Agent Version 1.8 APM Server Version 7.3

Dockerfile

FROM openjdk:11-jre-slim

ADD https://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem /root/.postgresql/root.crt

COPY build/libs/reporting-service-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar app.jar
COPY elastic-apm-agent-1.8.0.jar apm-agent.jar
COPY run.sh run.sh

RUN chmod 777 run.sh

EXPOSE 8080

CMD ./run.sh

run.sh with APM enabled

#!/bin/bash

env=${SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE}

java \
-javaagent:apm-agent.jar \
-Delastic.apm.service_name=reporting-service \
-Delastic.apm.environment=${env} \
-Delastic.apm.server_urls=https://xy.apm.eu-central-1.aws.cloud.es.io:443 \
-Delastic.apm.application_packages=de.ottonow.xy \
-Delastic.apm.secret_token=xy \
-jar app.jar

run.sh without APM

#!/bin/bash

java \
-jar app.jar

The APM integration works and we retreive data, but the additional startup time is unbearable right now.

Any help is appreciated. If you need further information, please let me know.

[kevcodez]

@eyalkoren Performance greatly increased with the snapshot, thanks for solving it so quickly.

[eyalkoren]

@kevcodez not exactly a “bug”- whenever we apply any instrumentation, we need to look at the classes as they are loaded into the JVM and decide whether we need to instrument them or not. We normally try to filter as much as possible by doing light matching for all classes and heavy matching only on the minimal subset that passes the filters. I added such filtering now to this specific instrumentation.

Please unzip this snapshot agent build and use it instead of the agent you currently use, without the -Delastic.apm.disabled_instrumentations setting. If you leave this configuration, you won’t get your Apache HttpClient calls traced.