Show HN: Perforator – cluster-wide profiling tool for large data centers

78 points

a year ago

Hey HN! We are happy to share Perforator – our internal cluster-wide profiler with great support for native languages and a built-in AutoFDO pipeline to simplify sPGO builds. Perforator allows you to profile most binaries without having to recompile or adjust the build process. We use it at Yandex to profile each pod inside a large cluster at modest speed (99Hz), collecting petabytes of profiles every day.

There's a blog post about it at https://medium.com/yandex/yandexs-high-performance-profiler-....

Inspired by Google-Wide Profiling, we started continuous profiling years ago with simple tools like poormansprofiler.org. With the rise of eBPF, we came up with a simple and elegant solution providing detailed profiles without noticeable overhead. Pretty wild when you can see the guts of your production binaries in a flamegraph without them even noticing.

Some technical details:

- Our main contribution is infrastructure for continuous PGO using AutoFDO. Google and Meta have done tremendous work on building PGO infrastructure, and we made the last missing piece of the puzzle to make this work well and scalable.

- Native binaries are profiled through eh_frame analysis, interpreted/JIT-compiled languages are profiled through perf-pid.map or hardcoded structure offsets.

- We render profiles in multiple ways, the most common one is a fast implementation of FlameGraphs, rendering 1M frames in 100ms.

- We provide Helm charts to easily deploy Perforator on your k8s cluster.

- You can use Perforator in standalone mode as a replacement for perf record.

I'd love to answer your questions about the tool!

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