Profiling Golang Applications with pprof

🔗Creating a profile

To profile Golang applications, pprof package is widely used. There’s a nice wrapper around it https://github.com/pkg/profile which allows you to just drop one line in your application and start generating profiles:

package main

func main() {

  defer profile.Start(profile.ProfilePath("."), profile.NoShutdownHook).Stop()

  // rest of your application
}

• profile.NoShutdownHook: This is important to pass to profile.Start if you’re shutting down your application with a SIGINT/SIGTERM and not handling profile storage directly. This will ensure the .pprof file gets saved correctly.

🔗Visualizing

go tool pprof -http=":8000" ./cpu.pprof

This allows you to visualize the pprof file in Graphviz and the more helpful Flamegraph visualizations.