I'd prefer to avoid calling an external process and use the library if possible. Not sure about including it in the project by default, but also not against.
If there's contention about including it, I wonder if it would make sense to explore java's optional module extension[1] to make this available optionally ? I can see this being useful for other extensions if we haven't explored that option. Then we could have another project cassandra-sidecar-extensions (or similar) that would be linked by sidecar/advanced operators to enable extended featureset in the main process. [1] - https://openjdk.org/projects/jigsaw/doc/topics/optional.html On Thu, 12 Jun 2025 at 17:57 Doug Rohrer <droh...@apple.com> wrote: > Hey folks! > > We're looking into enabling the sidecar to collect async profiles from > Cassandra and, digging through the async-profiler code and usage, it seems > like there may be a few different ways to do it. I’m curious if other folks > have already done this beyond just “run asprof with the pid of the > Cassandra process”, as I’m a bit hesitant to depend on executing an > external process from the Sidecar to gather the actual profile if we can > avoid it. > > There seem to be some opportunities to integrate the profiler into another > project (see > https://github.com/async-profiler/async-profiler/blob/master/docs/IntegratingAsyncProfiler.md#using-java-api) > but it seems this would end up having to be part of Cassandra, and somehow > callable via the sidecar (JMX? Some virtual table interface where you > insert a row to start a profile with the profiler options, and it kicks off > the profile, dumping the results into the table when it’s done?). > > The benefit in putting this functionality into Cassandra would be that > other consumers (in-jvm dtests, python dtests, other monitoring systems > where Sidecar isn’t available, easy-cass-lab) would be able to leverage the > same interface rather than having to re-invent the wheel each time. > > Drawback is it’s another library, and one with native library > dependencies, added to the class path and loaded at runtime. > > Thoughts? Previous experiences (good or bad)? > > Thanks, > > Doug >
