jhiccup ☆

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Description:
Measure pauses and stalls of an app's Java runtime platform

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Developer tools

Tags: java profiling performance monitoring jvm latency

Install: brew install jhiccup

About:
JHiccup is a diagnostic tool designed to measure and report the pauses, stalls, and latency hiccups within a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It works by running a separate monitoring thread that periodically measures the time it takes to execute a simple no-op operation, highlighting delays caused by Garbage Collection (GC), JIT compilation, or OS scheduling. This provides developers with a clear, visual representation of application responsiveness that is often missed by traditional average latency metrics.

Key Features:

Non-intrusive monitoring: Runs as a separate process or agent without requiring application code changes.
Visual latency reporting: Generates detailed histograms and text-based reports to visualize pause times.
High precision: Captures sub-millisecond stalls that can impact application performance and user experience.
JVM ecosystem integration: Works with any standard JVM, complementing tools like JVisualVM and JConsole.

Use Cases:

Identifying 'stop-the-world' garbage collection pauses in production Java applications.
Diagnosing latency spikes caused by JIT compilation or OS-level thread scheduling.
Validating if an application meets strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for responsiveness.

Alternatives:

JVisualVM – JVisualVM provides comprehensive profiling and memory analysis, while JHiccup focuses specifically on visualizing latency hiccups and pauses over time.
GC logs / -Xlog – Standard GC logs show memory management pauses but require parsing; JHiccup visualizes all types of stalls, including those unrelated to memory.

Version History

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