How to Debug CPU Regressions Using Flame Graphs

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How quickly can you debug a CPU performance regression? If your environment is complex and changing quickly, this becomes challenging with existing tools. If it takes a week to root cause a regression, the code may have changed multiple times, and now you have new regressions to debug.

Debugging CPU usage is easy in most cases, thanks to CPU flame graphs. To debug regressions, I would load before and after flame graphs in separate browser tabs, and then blink between them like searching for Pluto. It got the job done, but I wondered about a better way.

Read more on Brendan Gregg’s blog.