Troubleshooting Performance

Profiling a running Tarmac instance

Troubleshooting Performance Issues or Memory leaks within running services can be a complex task. Luckily, Tarmac uses the native Go tooling to create profiling snapshots of a running instance.

PProf is a Go tool for capturing and visualizing profiling data. Tarmac uses the net/http/pprof package to make PProf available via HTTP end-points.

By default, all PProf end-points are disabled, preventing unauthorized use of PProf (which itself can affect performance). To enable PProf, set the Configuration value of enable_pprof to true. Using a distributed configuration service such as Consul, users can change this value live without restarting the application instance.

Follow the Configuration guide for more details on configuring Tarmac.

Once enabled, users can use the following end-points to capture profiling data.

URI	Description
/debug/pprof	PProf Index linking to individual profiling pages
/debug/pprof/allocs	A sampling of all past memory allocations
/debug/pprof/block	Stack traces that led to blocking on synchronization primitives
/debug/pprof/cmdline	The command line invocation of the current program
/debug/pprof/goroutine	Stack traces of all current goroutines
/debug/pprof/heap	A sampling of memory allocations of live objects
/debug/pprof/mutex	Stack traces of holders of contended mutexes
/debug/pprof/profile	CPU Profile
/debug/pprof/threadcreate	Stack traces that led to the creation of new OS threads
/debug/pprof/trace	A trace of execution of the current program

More information about PProf can be found via the official documentation.