The last post in our Profiling in Production series we covered instrumentation and sampling profilers. We talked about “resources of interest” but which ones are the most useful for diagnosing performance bottlenecks? The most commonly used resource is time. We’ve been deliberately vague about the concept of timing so far because when it comes to computers there’s actually two types of timing..

In this blog post we’re going to look at performance profiling. What it is and how it works. This is the first post in our series on Profiling in Production, by the end of the series you’ll have an understanding of how profilers work, which ones are safe and efficient in production, how to read and interpret the data they produce and finally, how to use this knowledge to keep on top of performance.