Files
asmhatreandClaude Opus 5 644da9e65e Add docker-images: one Spring Boot 4 service packaged nine ways
Companion code for "Dockerizing Spring Boot 4: Layered Jars, Buildpacks,
Distroless and Image Size Benchmarks". Fat jar on JDK and JRE, layered jar
on Debian, Alpine and distroless, jlink, the JDK 25 AOT cache, Paketo
buildpacks and Jib, each measured for size on disk and pushed, rebuild
delta, startup, user and shell. Also PID 1 and signal handling, the jdeps
module gap, AOT cache mismatches and buildpacks memory calculation.
Transcripts in docs/output/, regenerated by scripts/run-all.sh.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01C3TETMrqVUWeFkNtz3Jbo3
2026-09-11 17:11:46 +00:00

2.3 KiB

5. jlink: 133 MB smaller, 15 metrics quieter

← 4. Buildpacks · Index · Next: 6. AOT cache →

Dockerfile.jlink-distroless asks jdeps which JDK modules the application needs and builds a runtime with only those:

jdeps --ignore-missing-deps -q --recursive --multi-release 25 --print-module-deps \
      --class-path 'extracted/dependencies/lib/*' extracted/application/application.jar

It chose 18 modules (jlink-metrics.txt) - including java.desktop, because Spring uses java.beans. On distroless/java-base the image is 119 MB on disk against 252 MB for distroless with the full JRE.

It runs. It is also missing something.

The jdeps-only image starts, serves requests and passes its health check. Its startup log has two warnings:

i.m.c.i.binder.jvm.JvmGcMetrics          : GC notifications will not be available because com.sun.management.GarbageCollectionNotificationInfo is not present
i.m.c.i.binder.jvm.JvmGcMetrics          : GC notifications will not be available because no GarbageCollectorMXBean of the JVM provides any. GCs=[G1 Young Generation, G1 Concurrent GC, G1 Old Generation]

and /actuator/prometheus exports 46 metric names instead of 61. Gone: jvm_gc_pause_seconds_*, jvm_gc_memory_allocated_bytes_total, jvm_gc_live_data_size_bytes, process_cpu_usage, system_cpu_usage, process_files_open_files and more - 15 in total.

com.sun.management.* lives in the jdk.management module, and Micrometer touches it reflectively, which jdeps cannot see. Nothing fails; the GC and CPU panels of your dashboard just go flat after the image switch. The Dockerfile now adds it by default:

ARG EXTRA_MODULES="jdk.management"

With it, the only difference left is jvm_gc_concurrent_phase_time_*, which Micrometer registers lazily inside its GC notification listener - it appears after the first G1 concurrent cycle, which may or may not have happened a few seconds after startup, in either image.

The general rule: diff the metric names, not just the health check, before shipping a jlink image. Other modules commonly needed only reflectively are jdk.crypto.cryptoki (PKCS#11), jdk.localedata (non-English locale data) and jdk.naming.dns (DNS lookups through JNDI).