A system and method for providing virtual machine diagnostic information. In accordance with an embodiment, a “flight recorder”, for use with a virtual machine, such as a Java virtual machine (JVM), allows a system administrator, software developer or other user experiencing a system problem to “go back in time” and analyze what happened right before a particular problem occurred in their system, and/or obtain an extremely detailed level of profiling without impacting system performance. The flight recorder does this by being tightly integrated into the core of the JVM itself, and by being very conscious of its performance overhead. This allows the flight recorder to provide a large amount of information on the inner workings of the JVM, and on Java programs running in the JVM.