Get the latest tech news

Low Overhead Allocation Sampling with VMProf in PyPy's GC


Introduction There are many time-based statistical profilers around (like VMProf or py-spy just to name a few). They allow the user to pick a trade-off between profiling precision and runtime overhead

If sampling is turned off, the slow path in collect_and_reserve has three extra instructions for the if at the beginning, but are only a very small amount of overhead, compared to doing a minor collection. The nursery usually has a size of a few megabytes, but profiling long-runningor larger applications with tons of allocations could result in very high number of samples per second (and thus overhead). In a future blog post, we are going to dive into the actual usage of allocation sampling with VMProf, and show an example case study.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of PyPy

PyPy

Photo of vmprof

vmprof

Photo of overhead allocation

overhead allocation

Related news:

News photo

Musings on Tracing in PyPy

News photo

PyPy gets a new RISC-V JIT back end

News photo

PyPy has been working for me for several years now