Company
Date Published
Author
Kristin Knapp
Word count
1080
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Roblox, a massively popular platform with over 71.5 million daily users and 2.4 million developers, has revolutionized its runtime diagnostics process to ensure seamless user experiences by integrating Grafana Pyroscope for on-demand profiling. Previously, debugging was a manual, inefficient, and security-laden process requiring engineers to access production environments to diagnose issues. By embedding the Pyroscope Profiler into their container-based images and leveraging Grafana Cloud Profiles, Roblox engineers can dynamically manage profiling, leading to faster identification and resolution of bottlenecks, such as optimizing poor-performing libraries and improving CPU usage. This shift has led to significant performance gains, including a 36% reduction in CPU usage from replacing a JSON library and a 10x improvement in throughput for a new service. Roblox aims to further enhance this system with event-based profiling and ultimately continuous profiling, marking a pivotal step toward integrating runtime diagnostics as a critical pillar of observability alongside logs, metrics, and traces.