Yandex Open-Sources Perforator: Find Code Inefficiencies & "Save Billions of Dollars"

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 30 January 2025 at 10:29 AM EST. 30 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Internet tech company Yandex announced the open-source release today of Perforator as a tool to help identify and evaluate code inefficiencies at scale. They say Perforator can lead to businesses saving "billions of dollars a year on server infrastructure."

Perforator is a continuous profiling application that analyzes CPU profiles from production servers to look for performance inefficiencies. Perforator relies on eBPF, is able to unwind without needing frame pointers or debug symbols on the production servers, and supports a variety of languages from C++ to Go to Rust, Java, Python, and Node.js. As part of the performance tooling, Perforator can also rebuild applications with collected profiles and employing Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO).

Yandex claims that Perforator can run with just 512MB of RAM and less than 1% of host CPU resources to make it suitable for continuously running on production servers for profiling.

Perforator logo


Yandex wrote in today's press release that Perforator can optimize applications and reduce infrastructure costs by up to 20%... Similar to their claims of saving billions of dollars annually, the claims seem extremely ambitious and would rely on currently using a lot of unoptimized code in production.

Perforator is open-source under an MIT license. Those wanting to check it out can find it on GitHub. The project site with plenty of documentation is at Perforator.tech.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week