Tracing, Profiling & Debugging in Production (eBPF)

It can be difficult to Trace, Profile or Debug applications in production due to both the performance overhead or required preparation (needing to have already configured a framework).

There are now a number of modern techniques including eBPF-based tools that allow us to trace applications at runtime and ptrace-based tools such as pyflame that allow us to profile applications without pre-loading any code and with minimal performance overhead. These tools can be particularly helpful in production environments.

We will look at how to use a number of tools including pyflame, py-spy and eBPF based tool pythoncalls and how these might be used to solve production problems including

• Profiling code to understand a specific performance problem that suddenly appears in production
• Understanding where a production process is stuck and stops responding
• Debugging an application that is behaving inappropriately

After this talk you should be empowered with an understanding of how these tools can help you in a future production scenario.