Why Is My Go Tool pprof Output Blank Even When Profiling My Application?

Go Tool pprof Failure: Consistent Output Flaws Regardless of Profiling Target

The pprof tool, previously reliable for performance profiling in Go applications, has been encountering an issue where it consistently produces broken and barren output, regardless of the targeted application. This problem has affected various applications, including web applications, and has persisted even after operating system upgrades.

One notable example is that instead of generating a detailed call graph or providing a list of topmost function calls, pprof produces output that resembles:

269.97kB of 269.97kB total ( 100%)
flat     flat%     sum%            cum            cum%
269.97kB    100%    100%    269.97kB       100%

To generate the profiles, the developer used the "github.com/davecheney/profile" package with Go v1.5.1. Here's a summary of their profiling process:

• Import the "profile" package into the main.go file.
• Place defer profile.Start(profile.MemProfile).Stop() at the beginning of the main function.
• Build the binary using go build.
• Run the binary using ./binary_name.

Expectedly, the command line should display the message, "memory profiling enabled," followed by the path to the profile file (e.g., /var/folders/.../mem.pprof).

While the code runs as intended, the pprof analysis of the output file (/path/to/profile.pprof) provides insufficient information for troubleshooting.

Solution:

The issue lies in the pprof invocation. The user mistakenly omitted the binary name when calling go tool pprof. To resolve the problem, it is essential to specify the binary along with the profile file path:

go tool pprof ./binary_name /path/to/profile.pprof

This modification ensures that pprof analyzes the intended binary, which should result in the expected detailed performance analysis output.

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