pprof VS tracing

Compare pprof vs tracing and see what are their differences.

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pprof tracing
12 52
7,423 4,919
2.1% 2.9%
7.6 8.1
7 days ago 7 days ago
Go Rust
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pprof

Posts with mentions or reviews of pprof. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-25.
  • Profiling Caddy
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    The pprof format is not tied to Go. From my understanding, it's used within Google across multiple languages. The format is defined in the pprof repository[0], and the visualization tool is source-language agnostic. I've seen libraries in numerous languages (e.g. Python, Java) to publish profiles in pprof format. This is an indicator the pprof format has become de-facto. Grafana Pyroscope[1] is a tool that's capable of parsing the pprof format, agnostic to the source programming language, and has instructions for Go, Java, Python, Ruby, node.js, Rust, and .NET.

    My understanding is that you're searching for a combination of the profiles, metrics, and tracing. Caddy supports all 3.

    [0] https://github.com/google/pprof/blob/main/doc/README.md

    [1] https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/

    metrics and tracing need to be manually enabled (for now, perhaps)

  • Why So Slow? Using Profilers to Pinpoint the Reasons of Performance Degradation
    2 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2023
    Because we couldn't identify the issue using the results we got from Callgrind, we reached for another profiler, gperftools. It's a sampling profiler and therefor it has a smaller impact on the application's performance in exchange for less accurate call statistics. After filtering out the unimportant parts and visualizing the rest with pprof, it was evident that something strange was happening with the send function. It took only 71 milliseconds with the previous implementation and more than 900 milliseconds with the new implementation of our Bolt server. It was very suspicious, but based on Callgrind, its cost was almost the same as before. We were confused as the two results seemed to conflict with each other.
  • Improving the performance of your code starting with Go
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Dec 2022
    github.com - google/pprof
  • Proposal to Support Timestamps and Labels in Pprof Events
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2022
  • A Generic Approach to Troubleshooting
    4 projects | dev.to | 20 Sep 2022
    The application performances in a specific code path (e.g. gdb, pprof, …).
  • Does rust have a visual analysis tool for memory and performance like pprof of golang?
    11 projects | /r/rust | 14 May 2022
    pprof is https://github.com/google/pprof, it's a very useful tool in golang , and really really really convenient
  • pprof - tool for visualization and analysis of profiling data
    1 project | /r/github_trends | 2 May 2022
  • Tokio Console
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Dec 2021
    Go also has pretty good out of the box profiling (pprof[0]) and third-party runtime debugging (delv[1]) that can be used both remotely and local.

    These tools also have decent editor integration and can be use hand in hand:

    https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2019/04/03/profiling-go-applic...

    https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2020/03/03/how-to-find-gorouti...

    [0] https://github.com/google/pprof

    [1] https://github.com/go-delve/delve

  • Cats and Clouds – There Are No Pillars in Observability with Yoshi Yamaguchi
    8 projects | dev.to | 3 Nov 2021
    And what we do in Google Cloud is that we still use the pprof. But it's a kind of forked version of the pprof because the visualization part is totally different. So we give that tool as the Cloud Profiler. So that is the product name. And then, the difference between the pprof and a Cloud Profiler is that Cloud Profiler provides the agent library for each famous programming language such as Java, Python, Node.js, and Go. And then what you need to do is to just write 5 to 10 lines of code in a new application. That launches the profile agent in your application as a subsidiary thread of the main thread. And then, that thread periodically collects the profile data of the application and then sends that data back to Google Cloud and the Cloud Profiler.
  • Is there a way I can visualize all the function calls made while running the project(C++) in a graphical way?
    8 projects | /r/cpp | 15 Jun 2021
    gprftools (https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools) can be easily plugged in using LD_PRELOAD and signal, and has nice go implemented visualization tool https://github.com/google/pprof.

tracing

Posts with mentions or reviews of tracing. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-31.
  • Decrusting the tracing crate [video] by Jon Gjengset
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Feb 2024
    The video description is as follows:

    In this stream, we peel back the crust on the tracing crate — https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/ — and explore its interface, structure, and mechanisms. We talk about spans, events, their attributes and fields, and how to think about them in async code. We also dig into what subscribers are, how they pick up events, and how you can construct your own subscribers through the layer abstraction. For more details about tracing, see https://docs.rs/tracing/latest/tracing/.

  • Vendor lock-in is in the small details
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Oct 2023
    > What's been your biggest issues around ergonomics/amenities for OpenTelemetry?

    I can't speak generally, but in the Rust ecosystem the various crates don't play well together. Here's one example: <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/issues/2648> There are four crates involved (tracing-attributes, tracing-opentelemetry, opentelemetry, and opentelemetry-datadog) and none of them fit properly into any of the others.

  • Grimoire - A recipe management application.
    7 projects | /r/rust | 5 Oct 2023
    The tracing (logging) mechanism in an asynchronous codebase (tracing).
  • How easy is it to swap out your async runtime?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 10 Jul 2023
    Tracing is Tokio's alternative for async code.
  • Hey Rustaceans! Got a question? Ask here (27/2023)!
    9 projects | /r/rust | 3 Jul 2023
    At a technical level, in Rust, both [tracing]https://crates.io/crates/tracing) and log are entire ecosystems (though for the latter at least there's also third party logging frameworks), and there's at least a bridge from log to tracing.
  • How can I write a tracing subscriber that saves to a database?
    1 project | /r/rust | 3 Jul 2023
    I am using https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing for logging purposes in my application. I would like to develop a feature wherein logs should be saved to a database table (via sea-orm). Something similar is this, but it does not solve my needs fully.
  • A locking war story
    2 projects | /r/rust | 1 Jun 2023
    I've used the tracing infrastructure with tracing_flame to profile some hot paths in async code: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/tree/master/tracing-flame
  • I was wrong about rust
    4 projects | /r/rust | 20 May 2023
    Oh nice! IIRC when I checked, it was the Unicode tables that smashed the code size. I recently hit the same issue with the tracing crate, where a crate feature (for env var filtering) pulled in regex and my binary was suddenly 1MB bigger.
  • Debugging and profiling embedded applications.
    8 projects | /r/rust | 30 Mar 2023
    I know about tools such as tracing, jaeger or tracy. While having a complete tracing could be a potential solution, these tools don't work with no_std.
  • Custom Axum Logging for Routes?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 17 Mar 2023
    tracing by itself only outputs log data, you need to consume them in a subscriber, the tracing-subscriber crate exists for this. (example)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pprof and tracing you can also consider the following projects:

gperftools - Main gperftools repository

log4rs - A highly configurable logging framework for Rust

prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

slog - Structured, contextual, extensible, composable logging for Rust

jaeger - CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

env_logger - A logging implementation for `log` which is configured via an environment variable.

tracy - Frame profiler

log - Logging implementation for Rust

parca - Continuous profiling for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time. Saving infrastructure cost, improving performance, and increasing reliability.

opentelemetry-rust - The Rust OpenTelemetry implementation

massif-visualizer - Visualizer for Valgrind Massif data files

vector - A high-performance observability data pipeline.