pprof-rs VS pyroscope-rs

On top of others' specific recommendations, don't forget to profile! Tools like perf on Linux and pprof within Rust will tell you which functions are taking the most time.

https://github.com/tikv/pprof-rs: Seems to work nicely per se, but I cant seem to find any useful information in the flamegraph for my setting. I see mostly functions in std::thread but cant find the time it costs to render stuff or to do the actual computations which should be the most time consuming things. Not sure whether this is necessarily something wrong with pprof-rs, maybe I'm just bad at finding stuff in the flamegraph svg or bevys ECS is making this hard.

Have you looked into using pprof?

The library doesn't actually do any profiling (The profiler for Rust is pprof-rs: https://github.com/tikv/pprof-rs) but it's goal is to manage data returned by profilers (abstracted behind a Backend) and send this data to a Pyroscope Server (or exported to flamegraph, though this is being implemented in the commandline application).

The libunwind part is actually not related to overhead, this is just a nuance of the way that pprof-rs unwinds stack traces.

A general purpose profiler: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs

If someone is interested in this space, feel free to reach me!

I feel some of the OP points. I was working on a profiling agent lately, and one of the issues was running it on multiple platforms (just the four big ones linux/mac-x86/arm) on FFI (because it'll be run directly from python/ruby/etc...) and preferably having the thing just work without having to install or configure any dependencies.

Like OP I hit two walls: libunwind, and linking. For libunwind, I ended up downloading/compiling manually; and for linking there is auditwheel[1]. Although it is a Python tool, I did actually end up using for Ruby (by creating a "fake python package", and then copying the linked dependencies).

It was at that time that I learned about linking for dynamic libraries, patchelf and there is really no single/established tool to do this. I thought there should be something but most people seem to install the dependencies with any certain software. I also found, the hard way, that you still have to deal with gcc/c when working with Rust. It does isolate you from many stuff, but for many things there is no work around.

There is a performance hit to this strategy, however, since shared dynamic libraries will be used by all the running programs that need them; whereas my solution will run its own instance. It made me wonder if wasm will come up with something similar without affecting portability.

Finally, the project is open source and you can browse the code here: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/auditwheel

Version 0.5 is now live!: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs

Working on https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs A profiling solution for Rust and other languages.

Thanks to the maintainers at pprof-rs for helping us figure out how we can modify their profiler to create our rust agent (https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs).