Nitro : A quick and simple profiler for golang

Nitro is a quick and easy performance analyzer library for golang. It is useful for comparing A/B against different drafts of functions or different functions. Building on the standard pprof library, Nitro provides a very high level view of your application performance to help identify areas to investigate further. It also provides an easy metric to compare as you revise and improve each part of your application.

Implementing Nitro

Using Nitro is simple. First use go get to install the latest version of the library.

$ go get github.com/spf13/nitro

Next include nitro in your application.

import "github.com/spf13/nitro"

Somewhere near the beginning of your application (or where you want to begin profiling) call

timer := nitro.Initalize()

Then throughout your application wherever a major division of work is call

timer.Step("name of step")

Flags

Nitro automatically adds a flag to your application. If you aren’t already using flags in your application the following code is an example of how you may use flags. Make sure to import “flag”.

func main() {
    flag.Parse()

}

Usage

Once the library is implemented throughout your application simply run your application and pass the “-stepAnalysis” flag to it. It does not need to be built to run, but can be called from go run or the binary form.

$ go run ./my_application -stepAnalysis

Example output

The following output comes from the hugo static site generator library. Nitro was built as a component of hugo and was extracted into it’s own library.

$ ./main -p spf13 -b http://localhost -d -stepAnalysis

initialize & template prep:
    4.664481ms (5.887625ms)	        0.43 MB 	4583 Allocs
import pages:
    65.196788ms (71.107809ms)	   17.13 MB 	70151 Allocs
build indexes:
    1.823434ms (72.960713ms)	    0.12 MB 	3720 Allocs
render and write indexes:
    212.06721ms (285.057592ms)	   65.72 MB 	362557 Allocs
render and write lists:
    17.796945ms (302.87847ms)	    7.76 MB 	33122 Allocs
render pages:
    50.092756ms (352.998539ms)	   11.27 MB 	139898 Allocs
render shortcodes:
    11.34692ms (364.386939ms)	    6.24 MB 	21260 Allocs
render and write homepage:
    4.075194ms (368.497883ms)	    0.84 MB 	3906 Allocs
write pages:
    8.73933ms (377.263888ms)	    0.11 MB 	1672 Allocs

Release Notes

• 0.4.0 June 19, 2013
  • Implement first draft

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Contributors

Names in no particular order:

• spf13

License

nitro is released under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE.txt