Go pprof for detecting wasted Goroutines

I. Setup pprof

Step 1: Setup the server

Despite what kind of your Golang app is, add those lines of code to the main.go file:

// Add this
import _ "net/http/pprof"


func main() {

    // Add this to run pprof server
    go func() {
        fmt.Println(http.ListenAndServe("localhost:9999", nil))
    }()

    // The rest is your normal code...
}

Step 2: Visualize the data

# Install Google pprof visual tool
go get -u github.com/google/pprof

# Visualize CPU profile for 5 seconds
pprof -http :9998 'http://:9999/debug/pprof/profile?seconds=5'

pprof command will open an interactive web at http://localhost:9998 for you to poke around.

II. Look at the graph

When doing nothing, our app results in this graph (part of it):

Now something must be wrong with one of our for-select code because we are paying CPU time for the app to do nothing. Turn out it was a default: continue bug in a for-select block.

After the fix, we get:

[blank]

Yes, we got nothing, because when idling the app shouldn’t do anything, hence must consume nothing.