In a world where microservices are more and more a standard architecture for Java-based applications running in the cloud, the JVM warmup time can become a limitation.

Especially when you look at spinning up new instances of an app as a response to changes in load, the warmup time can be a problem. Native images are one solution to solve these problems because their statically ahead-of-time compiled code simply doesn’t have to warm up and consequently has a short startup time. But even with the shorter startup time and the smaller footprint, it doesn’t come without a drawback. The overall performance might be slower because of the missing JIT optimizations at runtime.

There is a new OpenJDK project called CRaC (Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint), whose goal is to address the JVM warmup problem with a different approach. The idea is to take a snapshot of the running JVM, store it in files and restore the JVM at a later point in time (or even on another machine).
This session will give you a short overview of the CRaC project and shows some results from a proof of concept implementation.