Profiling

Parts 2 and 4 of this series describe what OBI (OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation) and the OpenTelemetry eBPF profiler can do. Here we make them do it with Docker Compose and no Kubernetes: one Go server nobody touches, OBI watching its requests, the profiler watching its CPU. We’ll follow one request, GET /orders/42, and see it twice, first as a trace and then as CPU samples. This is a companion to the How to Instrument Go Without Changing a Single Line of Code series, between Part 4 and Part 5, and the hands-on side of my GopherCon UK talk. It all ran on one machine: a Colima VM (Ubuntu 24.04, kernel 6.8.0, linux/arm64, 2 CPUs, 2 GB) on an M4 Max laptop, not Docker Desktop. It’s one run, a demo and not a benchmark. ...

Many tools that profile Go binaries resolve function names from the ELF symbol table or DWARF debug info, and production builds strip both. Point one of those profilers at a stripped binary and you get addresses, not names. The opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler doesn’t have this problem, and we’re going to find out why. Let’s start with a binary rather than a profiler. Here is the whole program, with //go:noinline so the compiler can’t fold checkout into main: ...

Profiling Python with eBPF: A New Frontier in Performance Analysis Profiling Python applications can be challenging, especially in scenarios involving high-performance requirements or complex workloads. Existing tools often require code instrumentation, making them impractical for certain use cases. Enter eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter)—a versatile Linux technology—and the open-source project Parca, which together are reshaping how Python profiling works. I’ll cover how eBPF enables continuous profiling, the challenges of stack unwinding in Python, and what modern profiling tools can do with all of this. ...

Most Python profilers ask you to decide in advance. You import something, or you wrap the process, or you restart it with a flag. That works on your laptop and helps little at 3 a.m., when the profile you want is of a process that has already been running for six hours. eBPF changes the bargain. An agent samples from the kernel on a timer, and the application never knows it is there. For compiled code that is close to free: read the registers, walk the frames, resolve the addresses against DWARF. Python is where it stops being easy. ...

https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2023/10/04/profiling-python-and-ruby-with-ebpf/