As system architectures grow in complexity, performance issues have become far more than just a series of errors in a log file. Where did the memory go? What’s consuming the CPU? Why is I/O suddenly bottlenecked? These deep-seated problems, hidden within your production environment, could be silently degrading your business services.

Today, we are excited to announce two major upgrades to OpenResty XRay, breaking through technical barriers and further expanding its diagnostic capabilities: non-intrusive analysis of Java application memory and, for the first time, flame graphs for Lua inside Envoy. These features help developers understand the true state of their system internals in a lighter, faster, and smarter way.

Gain Complete Insight into Java Application Memory, Non-Intrusively

Tired of battling Java memory issues? Frustrated by traditional diagnostic tools that are complex, disruptive, and often demand costly restarts, parameter tweaks, or even JDK replacements?

It doesn’t have to be this hard anymore.

Introducing the all-new OpenResty XRay Java Memory Analysis Tool — designed to make memory diagnostics simple, fast, and production-safe.

• Attach Anytime, No Hassle: Forget about code changes or JDK swaps. Instantly hook into any running Java process — whether it’s OpenJDK, OracleJDK, or beyond — with zero downtime.

• Visualize What Really Matters: Our exclusive Memory Reference Path Graph lets you see the actual memory flow and object relationships at a glance — no more guesswork.

• Built for Production: With minimal overhead, XRay is safe to use on your live, mission-critical systems without impacting performance.

And it doesn’t stop at Java, OpenResty XRay also supports live memory analysis for Lua, Python, PHP, and Perl.

Finally, you can answer: Where did all my Java memory go?

Unlocking the Lua Performance Black Box Inside Envoy

In the cloud-native era, Envoy has become a critical building block for modern service meshes and API gateways. Its powerful Lua scripting brings incredible flexibility—but also introduces hidden performance pitfalls.

When latency spikes, where’s the problem really coming from?

Is Envoy itself too resource-intensive? Is our Lua script creating a bottleneck? Is it CPU-bound computation—or I/O that’s stalling the entire chain? In the past, getting these answers in real time was nearly impossible. Today, OpenResty XRay brings end-to-end observability and takes you straight to the root cause—with zero guesswork.

• Real-time Flame Graphs: Instantly capture on-CPU and off-CPU flame graphs from live Envoy instances—no restarts, no downtime.
• Automatic Root-Cause Analysis: AI-powered diagnostics predict and prevent issues before they impact users, enabling proactive performance tuning.
• AIOps for Platform Engineering: Safe, production-grade online sampling with intelligent, self-healing insights—designed for modern platform teams.

With OpenResty XRay, you move from reactive firefighting to predictive, automated performance management.

It’s time to give your Envoy Lua filters a deep performance health check.

The Road Ahead

OpenResty XRay is dedicated to becoming the most flexible, powerful, and effortless dynamic tracing tool for developers worldwide. Dynamic tracing for Node.js is under development, with future support planned for analyzing V8 (JavaScript) embedded in Envoy. Our goal is to make the dynamic analysis of any complex system both simple and transparent.

What is OpenResty XRay

OpenResty XRay is a dynamic-tracing product that automatically analyzes your running applications to troubleshoot performance problems, behavioral issues, and security vulnerabilities with actionable suggestions. Under the hood, OpenResty XRay is powered by our Y language targeting various runtimes like Stap+, eBPF+, GDB, and ODB, depending on the contexts.

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About The Author

Yichun Zhang (Github handle: agentzh), is the original creator of the OpenResty^® open-source project and the CEO of OpenResty Inc..

Yichun is one of the earliest advocates and leaders of “open-source technology”. He worked at many internationally renowned tech companies, such as Cloudflare, Yahoo!. He is a pioneer of “edge computing”, “dynamic tracing” and “machine coding”, with over 22 years of programming and 16 years of open source experience. Yichun is well-known in the open-source space as the project leader of OpenResty^®, adopted by more than 40 million global website domains.

OpenResty Inc., the enterprise software start-up founded by Yichun in 2017, has customers from some of the biggest companies in the world. Its flagship product, OpenResty XRay, is a non-invasive profiling and troubleshooting tool that significantly enhances and utilizes dynamic tracing technology. And its OpenResty Edge product is a powerful distributed traffic management and private CDN software product.

As an avid open-source contributor, Yichun has contributed more than a million lines of code to numerous open-source projects, including Linux kernel, Nginx, LuaJIT, GDB, SystemTap, LLVM, Perl, etc. He has also authored more than 60 open-source software libraries.