An agent that instruments a large number of classes in a complex application will most significantly impact which performance metric?
Java interview question for Advanced practice.
Answer
Application startup time
Explanation
While an agent can affect runtime performance, its most direct and significant impact, especially when instrumenting many classes, is on application startup time. Every class that gets loaded must first be passed through the agent's transformer. This transformation logic takes time, and the cumulative delay across thousands of classes can add seconds or even minutes to the application's startup process.