Monitoring Performance of Golang Applications Using Code Profiling

Debugging and monitoring are essential for building scalable and reliable applications. Often, real-world applications have performance regressions. These can be hard to root cause using conventional debugging and monitoring tools. Code profiling tools can be quite handy for such scenarios. Profiling tools can be used to detect hotspots, i.e., parts of code that have poor performance and high resource utilization. Profiling tools provide deep insights into the runtime behavior of an application which can be useful in general. The pprof package can be used for profiling of Golang applications. This tool is easy to use and can provide information about a lot of runtime aspects of a program. In this paper, we take a look at pprof, how to use it in Golang and review the benefits and caveats associated with its use.