Profiling Golang server

Question

I want to profile a simple webserver that I wrote in Go. It accepts requests, maps the request to avro object and sends it to Kafka in a go routine. The requirement is that it answers immediately and sends an object to the Kafka later. Locally it answers in under 1 ms on average. I have been trying to profile it by starting the script with davecheney/profile package and sending test requests with jmeter. I can see in the output that the profile file is generated but it remains empty, no matter how long jemeter is sending the requests. I'm running it on Mac El Capitan. I read that there were some issues with profiling on Mac but it would be working on El Capitan. Do you have any tips?

Answer 1

Firstly, I'm not sure whether you're trying to do latency profiling. If so, be aware that Go's CPU profiler only reports time spent by a function executing on the CPU and doesn't include time spent sleeping, etc. If CPU Profiling really is what you're looking for, read on.

If you're running a webserver, just include the following in your imports (in the file where main() is) and rebuild:

import _ "net/http/pprof"

Then, while applying load through jmeter, run:

go tool pprof /path/to/webserver/binary http://<server>/debug/pprof/profile

The net/http/pprof package provides profiling hooks that allow you to profile your webserver on demand any time, even while it's running in production. You may want to use a different, firewalled port for it, though, if your webserver is meant to be exposed publicly.