What are File Stream Operations?

The Plumbr Agent monitors file reading and writing operations performed by using FileInputStream and FileOutputStream classes. When the wait time for the read and write operations starts impacting end user experience, Plumbr recognizes this and links a File Stream Operation root cause with the slow transaction. The root cause exposed will contain the following information:

• File(s) being read/written, along with their path in file system, size and other relevant attributes.
• Call stack from the thread executing the operation, zooming you right to the line in source code accessing the file system.

There are several common problems that happen when reading from or writing to a file stream and leading to slow transactions:

• Lack of buffering: each read or write operation incurs overhead, depending on the operating system, file system and hardware. Instead of reading or writing one byte at a time, a much more performant approach would be to do it in bulk. A simple approach would be to make use of a BufferedInputStream or BufferedOutputStream
• System issues: like we said above, the performance of file operation depends on the operating system, the file system and the hardware. It is sometimes the case that one of these becomes the bottleneck, and even a single file stream operation could take tens of seconds.