Our Blog

Welcome to the Polar Signals blog where we write about profiling, performance, and company culture.

Ice and Fire: How to read icicle and flame graphs

Flame graphs and icicle graphs are a great way to visualize performance profiles. In this post, we will learn how to read and interpret them.

March 28, 2023 | Kemal Akkoyun

Continuous profiling

Profiling

Icicle graphs

Flame graphs

Performance

Performance monitoring

Performance profiling

Performance Analysis

Data Visualization

Designing Your Indexes for Better Database Performance

How we improved our database query performance by 80% and the intuition behind the changes that led to this improvement

March 20, 2023 | Alfonso Subiotto Marqués

Parca

Databases

Performance

Indexes

Schema

What’s new in Parca 0.16 and Parca Agent 0.13?

We have exciting updates in this release, including improved JIT symbolization, reliability and quality improvements, step querying, and more!

February 28, 2023 | Javier Honduvilla Coto, Yomi Eluwande

Continuous-Profiling

Profiling

Parca

Parca Agent

DWARF

DWARF-Based Unwinding

JIT

Symbolization

Step Querying

Icicle Graphs

Symbolizing Postgres Profiling Data

A journey through undocumented behavior.

February 8, 2023 | Frederic Branczyk

Postgres

Sql

Profiling

Continuous-Profiling

Debuginfo

Debuginfod

DWARF

Polar Signals at FOSDEM 2023

Attending FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels.

February 3, 2023 | Frederic Branczyk

FOSDEM

Community

Introduction to Parca - Part 2

Parca Agent is our open source, always-on eBPF-based continuous profiler. In this article, we will learn some of the concepts behind Parca Agent and use it to profile our system.

January 19, 2023 | Sumera Priyadarsini

Continuous-Profiling

BPF

eBPF

Observability

Parca

Parca Agent

Debuginfo

Relabeling

What's new in Parca?

Looking at some exciting features that recently landed in Parca.

January 3, 2023 | Frederic Branczyk

Continuous-Profiling

BPF

eBPF

Observability

Parca

Parca Agent

Debuginfo

Autocomplete

Relabeling

Prometheus

Design Decisions of a Continuous Profiler

The tradeoffs and considerations building continuous, fleet-wide profilers.

December 14, 2022 | Frederic Branczyk, Javier Honduvilla Coto, Kemal Akkoyun, Monica Wojciechowski, Thor Hansen

Continuous-Profiling

BPF

eBPF

Observability

Parca

FrostDB

High Cardinality

Debuginfod

Parca Agent