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google/pprof

9,173GoAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A Google tool for analyzing where a Go program spends time and memory, generating text reports and visual call graphs to help developers find and fix performance bottlenecks.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((pprof))
    What it does
      Performance profiling
      Memory analysis
    Output Types
      Text reports
      Visual call graphs
      Interactive CLI
    Data Sources
      Local profile file
      Running server
    Use Cases
      Find slow functions
      Compare code changes
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Profile a running Go HTTP server to identify which functions consume the most CPU or memory.

USE CASE 2

Compare profiles taken before and after a code change to verify whether a performance fix actually improved speed.

USE CASE 3

Generate a visual call graph from a recorded profile to understand execution flow and bottlenecks at a glance.

Tech stack

GoGraphviz

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Graphviz must be installed separately for visual graph output, text reports work without it.

In plain English

pprof is a tool from Google for analyzing how a program spends its time and resources while running. Developers use it to identify which parts of their code are slow or using more memory than expected. This kind of analysis is called profiling, and pprof is one of the most widely used tools for it in the Go programming language ecosystem, though it can also work with profiling data from other sources. The tool reads a file containing a recorded profile, which is a snapshot of what the program was doing at many points during execution. From that data, pprof can generate several types of output. You can get a text report listing the slowest functions ranked by how much time they consumed. You can generate a visual graph, displayed as a web page or an image file, that shows which functions called which others and how much time each one took. There is also an interactive mode where you type commands to explore the data from the command line. Profiles can come from a local file or be pulled directly from a running server over a network connection. Multiple profiles can be combined or compared against each other, which is useful for checking whether a code change made performance better or worse. Installing pprof requires Go to be set up on your machine. The README provides the installation command. Optional integration with Graphviz, a graph drawing library, is needed for generating visual diagrams. Google notes that pprof is not an officially supported Google product, meaning it is maintained on a best-effort basis without formal support commitments.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using pprof, show me how to profile a running Go HTTP server and identify the top CPU-consuming functions.
Prompt 2
How do I compare two pprof profile files to measure whether a code change improved performance?
Prompt 3
Generate a visual call graph from a pprof profile file and display it as a web page in my browser.
Prompt 4
Help me install pprof with Graphviz on Linux so I can produce PNG flame graph images from Go profiles.
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