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I see Zipkin is a Java app, without sounding like I’m hating on a language for no reason here - but I wonder if it’s awfully heavy and slow to launch like so most other java apps? By comparison I’d expect a tracer written in Go would be significantly more efficient.

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Does slow startup time matter for services that are supposed to be running continuously in a cluster environment?

I have no doubt that a Go tracer would start orders of magnitudes faster than a Java one (especially if it pulls in spring or other web-related dependencies for the zipkin UI) but I think it is irrelevant.

it's irrelevant. if you take a look at the diagrams in the blog post that include zipkin, it's is basically only the query/frontend portion - the tracing itself is done natively in the language the code is written in, and outputted to cassandra. The zipkin part is a long running server that just needs to query cassandra.

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