rbperf

rbperf is a low-overhead sampling profiler and tracer for Ruby (CRuby) which runs in BPF

Features

The main goals for rbperf are

• On-CPU profiling support
• Low overhead
• Profiled processes don't have to be restarted or modified in any way
• Support for tracing low level events, such as system calls

Installation

The latest release of is available here.

Usage

CPU sampling

$ sudo rbperf record --pid `pidof ruby` cpu

System call tracing

The available system calls to trace can be found with:

$ sudo rbperf record --pid `pidof ruby` syscall --list

$ sudo rbperf record --pid `pidof ruby` syscall enter_writev

Some debug information will be printed, and a flamegraph called rbperf_flame_$date will be written to disk 🎉

Supported Ruby versions

The currently supported Ruby versions:

• 2.6: 2.6.0, 2.6.3
• 2.7: 2.7.1, 2.7.4, 2.7.6
• 3.x: 3.0.0, 3.0.4, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.2.0, 3.2.1

Supported kernels

Linux kernel 4.18 is the minimum required version but 5.x and greater is recommended.

Building

To build rbperf you would need a modern Linux machine with:

• The Rust toolchain
• clang to compile the BPF code
• elfutils and zlib installed
• make and pkg-config to build libbpf

Once the dependencies are installed:

# As we are statically linking elfutils and zlib, we have to tell Rustc
# where are they located. On my Ubuntu system they are under
$ export RUSTFLAGS='-L /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu'
$ cargo build [--release]

The built binary can be found under target/(debug|release)/rbperf.

Developing and troubleshooting

Debug logs can be enabled with RUST_LOG=debug. The info subcommand, rbperf info shows the supported BPF features as well as other supported details.

Stability

rbperf is in active development and the CLI and APIs might change any time

Bugs

If you encounter any bugs, feel free to open an issue on rbperf's repo

Acknowledgements

rbperf wouldn't be possible without all the open source projects that we benefit from, such as Rust and all the superb crates we use in this project, Ruby and its GDB file, the BPF ecosystem, and many others!

License

Licensed under the MIT license