Profiling

• To understand the CPU or memory utilization within a program in order to optimize for execution time, size, or reliability

  • After a profile of a computer program is taken with a profiler, a report is created

  • This report, often called a profile, can tell you information about the program that you ran

• CPU profiling reasons

  • Check performance improvements in new releases of software

  • Validate how much CPU is being utilized for each task

  • Limit CPU utilization in order to save money

  • Understanding where latency comes from

• Memory profiling reasons

  • Incorrect usage of global variables

  • Goroutines that don't complete

  • Incorrect reflection usage

  • Large string allocation

• We can implement profiling in many stages of Go software development

  • Development (engineering), the creation of new functions (features)

  • Testing

  • Production

• It is important to remember

  • As more metrics are being collected on a continuous basis in your running binaries —> add a small performance penalty

  • But adding an additional (e.g: 5%) overhead for CPU and memory profiling is worth the cost in order to consistently write performant code —> this trade-off is acceptable