Continuous Profiling for Go Applications

Using Pyroscope — an open source continuous profiling platform

Profiling a Golang Rideshare App with Pyroscope

In this example, I show a basic use case of how to use Pyroscope — an open-source profiling library — to speed up a Golang application using continuous profiling.

We simulate a “rideshare” company that has three endpoints found in main.go:

• /bike : calls the OrderBike(searchRadius) function to order a bike
• /car : calls the OrderCar(searchRadius) function to order a car
• /scooter : calls the OrderScooter(searchRadius) function to order a scooter

I also simulate running 3 distinct servers in 3 different regions (via docker-compose.yml)

• us-east-1
• us-west-1
• eu-west-1

One of the most useful capabilities of Pyroscope is the ability to tag your data in a way that is meaningful to you. In this case, we have two natural divisions, and so we “tag” our data to represent those:

• region: statically tags the region of the server running the code
• vehicle: dynamically tags the endpoint (similar to how one might tag controller rails)

Tagging Profiles with a Static Region

Tagging something static, like the region, can be done in the initialization code in the main() function:

 pyroscope.Start(pyroscope.Config{
  ApplicationName: "ride-sharing-app",
  ServerAddress:   serverAddress,
  Logger:          pyroscope.StandardLogger,
  Tags:            map[string]string{"region": os.Getenv("REGION")},
 })

Tagging Profiles Dynamically within Functions

Tagging something more dynamically, as we do for the vehicle tag can be done inside our utility function FindNearestVehicle() using pyroscope.TagWrapper() :

func FindNearestVehicle(search_radius int64, vehicle string) {
 pyroscope.TagWrapper(context.Background(), pyroscope.Labels("vehicle", vehicle), func(ctx context.Context) {
       
        //…