Bcc-Tools

Hardware profiling with bcc-tools

Welcome back to my series on performance profiling! In this second installment, we’re shifting our focus towards a hands-on exploration of our hardware using the power of bcc-tools. Building on the foundational knowledge from our first post about flame graphs, we are now ready to delve deeper into the intricacies of system performance. These tools are a great way of understanding if we’re seeing bottlenecks in our hardware.

For a little background, bcc-tools is a collection of utilities that expose underlying kernel statistics through eBPF. eBPF is an amazing technology that lets us tap into what’s going on in the Linux kernel with negligible performance overhead. Fun stuff!