What Is Java Flight Recorder? Java Flight Recorder (JFR) is a low-overhead, always-on profiling and diagnostics framework built into the JVM. It was a commercial feature of Oracle JDK until JEP 328 (Java 11) open-sourced it as part of OpenJDK. JFR collects data about JVM internals and application behaviour — method profiling, allocation, GC pauses, thread states, I/O, lock contention — with a typical overhead of 1–2% in production. This makes it fundamentally different from traditional profilers (JProfiler, YourKit): those profilers cause 10–50% overhead, making them impractical for production.

Production Readiness Checklist [ ] JDK distribution chosen and version pinned [ ] Heap and Metaspace sized correctly [ ] GC selected and tuned for your workload [ ] Container-aware JVM flags set [ ] AppCDS archive built for faster startup [ ] JFR always-on recording configured [ ] GC logging enabled with rotation [ ] Security-related algorithms locked down [ ] Thread and connection pool sizes verified [ ] JVM exit flags prevent silent crashes Baseline JVM Flags for Java 11 Start with these flags and tune from here: