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Strobelight: A profiling service built on open source technology


We’re sharing details about Strobelight, Meta’s profiling orchestrator. Strobelight combines several technologies, many open source, into a single service that helps engineers at Meta improve effic…

eBPF allows the safe injection of custom code into the kernel, which enables very low overhead collection of different types of data and unlocks so many possibilities in the observability space that it’s hard to imagine how Strobelight would work without it. Strobelight has helped engineers at Meta realize countless efficiency and latency wins, ranging from increases in the number of requests served, to large reductions in heap allocations, to regressions caught in pre-prod analysis tools. A seasoned performance engineer was looking through Strobelight data and discovered that by filtering on a particular std::vector function call (using the symbolized file and line number) he could identify computationally expensive array copies that happen unintentionally with the ‘auto’ keyword in C++.

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