Flame Graphs for Online Performance Profiling

By Yichun Zhang (‎agentzh‎)
Date: Tuesday, 4 June 2013 10:35
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Language: English
Tags: dtrace flamegraph performance perl profiling systemtap

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In this talk I will discuss Brendan Gregg's Flame Graph tools for online performance profiling based on kernel-level dynamic tracing flameworks like systemtap and dtrace. Flame Graphs are a great new way to visualize hotspots in long-running user processes written in C/C++, Perl, Lua, or any other languages, and help programmers optimize their apps according to their online statistical behaviours.

I will introduce my custom-designed Perl scripts based on systemtap that can sample the real-time backtraces in live C/C++, Perl, or Lua daemons in a Linux production system at a very high frequency. These scripts make it possible to obtain information that can then be used to render Flame Graphs.

I will also discuss applications of Flame Graphs in tuning the performance of Perl web apps running in typical setups like Apache/mod_perl and PSGI/Starman. Success stories for using Flame Graphs within CloudFlare will also be presented.

Attended by: