Profilers with Julia Evans

When software is performing suboptimally, the programmer can use a variety of tools to diagnose problems and improve the quality of the code. A profiler is a tool for examining where a program is spending time.

Every program consists of a set of different functions. These functions call each other. The total amount of time that your program runs is the sum of the time your program spends in all of the different functions. When you run a program, you can execute a profiler on that program, and the profiler will give you a breakdown of which of the different functions time is being spent in.

If you have functions A, B, and C, your profiler might say that your program is spending 30% of its time in function A, 20% of its time in function B, and 50% of its time in function C.

Julia Evans is a software engineer at Stripe and the creator of a Ruby profiler called rbspy. rbspy can execute on a running Ruby program and report back with a profile. As Julia explains, a profiler turns out to be a non-trivial piece of software to build. To introspect a Ruby program, you need to understand how the Ruby interpreter is translating Ruby code into C structs for execution.

This episode is about profilers–but in order to talk about profilers, we also have to talk about Ruby, the Ruby interpreter, and the way that executing programs are laid out in memory.

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