Any performance overhead due to opentelemetry traces ?

[Krishnankk]

I am new to jaeger and opentelemetry.
I have a java application which is having @withspan annotation and some custom spans like below

Span span = tracer.spanBuilder("formatting body to groovy exec").startSpan();
//Some codes
span.end();

As per the user requirement, we should have an option to enable and disable sending traces to jaeger.

Java application running in kubernetes. enable and disable opentelemetry trace sending by changing yaml files for the corresponding application. Reference doc: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/configuration/sdk-environment-variables/#exporter-selection

For disabling

- name: OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER
   value: none
 

For enabling

- name: OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER
  value: otlp

After disabling, no jaeger traces will be exported and listed.

Q1) This is because, they expect there may be performance overhead due to opentelemetry, Is it true ?
But in my case i couldn't see any performance difference with this option "off".

Q2) Is this because performance overhead will be there even after disabling OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER ?

[steverao]

- name: OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER
   value: none

This env variable just means OTel Java Agent doesn't export the collected data to backend. It doesn't stop instrumenting your application and load some necessary classes.
About performance of OTel Java Agent, you can check out related description https://opentelemetry.io/docs/zero-code/java/agent/performance/