Get Specifics with Golang Memory Profiler

I created a web-server using Golang that ran machine learning algorithms for a video game. I was aware that the algorithms will take a large number of resources as the player data increases but I saw very large and inconsistent memory spikes that could use up to 4 to 6 gigs of RAM before going back to normal. Working with a web server that only had an 8GB of RAM in total and shared it with multiple services, I couldn’t have it so I attempted to investigate.

Golang has a pretty good documentation for its profiler. I would recommend going through it before doing anything else since it shows the complete ability of the profiler. I worked with it to produce the following code.

When your Golang application runs the

executeMemoryProfiler()

function, it will export the memory profile in the “mem.prof” file. The next step is to render this to show a memory trace. The documentation and many examples point you towards the following command:

go tool pprof mem.prof

You can then type “web” in the terminal to render your memory profile using a web browser. The problem is that you don’t see a lot of information which you can work with. I found a helpful blog post that addressed this issue. Try again but use the following command:

go tool pprof --alloc_space mem.prof

Again type “web” to render the profile. Now, you should see a more detailed flowchart of execution and the memory allocated to each function in that chart.

I hope this helps out someone, there isn’t a whole lot of information available about the quirks of memory profiling so I thought it would be a good idea to have a very basic post about it. Thanks for reading.