The Missing Half of Performance Profiling: Understanding Memory in Cloud Native Syste... Dom Delnano

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The Missing Half of Performance Profiling: Understanding Memory in Cloud Native Systems - Dom Delnano, Cosmic

The dynamic nature of cloud-native systems has made performance visibility a first-class concern. As performance needs rose in importance, tools like OTel's eBPF profiler, Pixie and Parca have made continuous CPU profiling mainstream, offering always-on, low-overhead insight into hot paths and compute waste across fleets.

In contrast, memory profiling lacks the standardization and efficiency that made CPU profiling ubiquitous. Existing tools range from language-specific debuggers to emerging observability integrations, each with unique sampling strategies and trade-offs. Few provide a unified view across containers or garbage-collected runtimes, and most remain too heavy for production use.

This talk offers a primer on memory profiling: what it measures, why it’s hard, and how it can evolve to match the success of continuous CPU profiling. We’ll walk through the landscape of profilers, from language-specific tools to system-wide approaches, and explore when each is most effective.

Видео The Missing Half of Performance Profiling: Understanding Memory in Cloud Native Syste... Dom Delnano канала CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]