Go Profiling with pprof: A Practical Guide

Go has excellent built-in profiling tools. Here is how to use them.

Activating pprof¶

import _ “net/http/pprof” go func() { log.Println(http.ListenAndServe(“:6060”, nil)) }()

CPU Profiling¶

go tool pprof http://localhost:6060/debug/pprof/profile?seconds=30

Memory¶

go tool pprof http://localhost:6060/debug/pprof/heap

Goroutines¶

curl http://localhost:6060/debug/pprof/goroutine?debug=1

Flame Graphs¶

go tool pprof -http=:8080 cpu.prof

Benchmarks¶

func BenchmarkMyFunc(b *testing.B) { for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ { MyFunc() } } go test -bench=. -benchmem

Optimization¶

• sync.Pool for repeated allocations
• Preallocate slices
• strings.Builder
• Buffered channels

Summary¶

pprof is built-in and powerful. CPU + heap covers 90% of problems.