Research topic
This topic focuses on explaining latency rather than only measuring end-to-end response time. The records study outlier detection, dependency and critical-path analysis, blocking or preemption, resource contention, distributed request behavior, and methods for ranking likely causes of intermittent delay.
Related search terms: latency outlier analysis · response-time diagnosis · tail-latency analysis
7 papers in this topic, ordered newest first. The detailed paper records contain the evidence-grounded methods, tools, datasets, findings, and citation guidance.
2026 · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
CARE combines distributed traces and profiling metrics with graph- and spectrum-based analysis to localize performance root causes in microservices.
Keywords: distributed traces · profiling metrics · context-aware RCA · microservice diagnosis · TrainTicket
2026 · Journal of Systems and Software
DTraComp is an open-source Eclipse Trace Compass framework that compares groups of distributed requests and attributes span time to user-space, kernel, thread-state, and system-call evidence.
Keywords: DTraComp · distributed trace comparison · OpenTracing · LTTng · LTTng-UST
2025 · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
HybridRCA combines critical-path-aware span analysis with targeted kernel metrics to reduce production trace volume while preserving root-cause localization evidence.
Keywords: critical path · hybrid tracing · production microservices · LTTng · OpenTracing
2024 · ACM/SPEC ICPE Companion
The paper identifies response-time variability in Alibaba microservice traces through critical-path extraction and variability analysis of service interactions.
Keywords: Alibaba microservice architecture · critical path · distributed traces · response-time variability · critical interactions
2024 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) Companion
The paper combines an unsupervised GraphSAGE model with critical-path-specific latency profiles to detect anomalous requests and rank likely microservice culprits without labelled training data.
Keywords: latency culprit ranking · distributed traces · GraphSAGE · graph neural networks · critical path
2021 · IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)
The paper combines system-level dependency graphs with automated outlier detection to localize likely causes of latency anomalies.
Keywords: latency outliers · system-level traces · dependency graphs · density-based models · z-score
2018 · IEEE Systems Conference
The paper correlates PHP user-space events with LTTng kernel events in a unified multilevel model to explain high-latency web requests.
Keywords: high latency · dynamic analysis · multilevel analysis · latency causes · LTTng