A Beginner’s Guide to Pprof: Optimizing your Go code

Miriah Peterson
3 min readJan 15, 2024
Gopher at a computer mastering memory management

Are you looking to improve your code? Are you looking to understand and avoid common traps and mistakes in your software services? If so, you’re in the right place. In this blog post, we’ll explore profiling and the powerful Pprof profiling tool!

Hidden Mistakes in Software

Software runs using two things, memory and CPU. It writes, reads, and re-writes bytes of data into memory and uses CPU to perform computation, transformation, and analysis on that data. If you are like me, and I am sure many of you are, then you easily forget about memory and CPU when you are writing software. I often think, “Oh, I will just deploy this on the cloud where CPU and memory are infinite”.

This allows for hidden cracks to slip into the code that can be hard to detect once the software is running. Have you ever had your software crash after running for 2–3 months, but it works perfectly after it restarts? Have you ever tried to spin up a bunch of goroutines but your software runs slower?

What is Profiling? How can it make my code better?

From Wikipedia we read
“In software engineering, profiling (“program profiling”, “software profiling”) is a form of dynamic program analysis that measures, for example, the space (memory)…

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Miriah Peterson

Data Reliability Engineer, Golang Instructor, Twitch streamer, Community organizer