About PProf

Tooling Profiling
1

Dear there,
I’ve a quick question about PProf. I’m using Julia 1.8.4, and I’m learning the new profile tool. So I follow a simple example as below. I first define a function:

function myfunc()
       A = rand(200, 200, 400)
       maximum(A)
end

Then run @time Profile.Allocs.@profile sample_rate=1 myfunc(). Then PProf.Allocs.pprof(from_c = false). And it creats “alloc-profile.pb.gz” as expect, and a web link http://localhost:62261. But the problem is I can’t open this link in any browsers (I’ve tried safari, google chrome and firefox). Do you happen to know how to solve this?

Thank you so much and happy new year!!

2

Hi, Kristin! Do you work in Julia’s REPL? Last time I used PProf, it seemed that a user has to stay in the REPL, because PProf creates a temporary server for viewing the “alloc-profile.pg.gz”. Exiting the REPL shutdowns the server.

Another option is to examine pprof data using pprof utility.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your reply! Yes I’m in Julia’s REPL. I run julia on a cluster, and I got the following web link, then I copy and paste to a browsers but can’t open it…
Screen Shot 2023-01-24 at 4.37.16 PM

And I just install pprof, but when I run pprof -web [main_binary] ./alloc-profile.pb.gz, I got error message:
[main_binary]: open [main_binary]: no such file or directory
Fetched 1 source profiles out of 2
Main binary filename not available.
pprof: exec: “sensible-browser”: executable file not found in $PATH

I feel it’s because I’m running this on a remote shell so I don’t have a browser there, but I’m not sure how to solve this…Could you give me some suggestion? Thank you!!

4

Can’t you run the same thing locally? Otherwise you need a proper Web server setup, with support from the firewall, router, etc.

5

I see, because the real code I want to check profile is quite computationaly expansive which I need run on a cluster, so I’m trying to get the profile feature work there.

But I just try to run the same thing locally, and got an error messgae:
zsh: no matches found: [main_binary]
Does this mean I need install main_binary? Thank you!

6

Sorry, I don’t use the zsh shell, and I’ve no idea what main_binary is in your setup.

7

If you have a remote shell, just set up a port redirect with ssh -L 62261:localhost:62261

2 Likes
8

If you want to work locally, my suggestion is

  1. Download profile file alloc-profile.pb.gz from the cluster
  2. Install pprof locally (or see P.S.)
  3. Run pprof -http=localhost:57599 -relative_percentages profile.pb.gz, you should see this
% pprof -http=localhost:57599 -relative_percentages profile.pb.gz
Main binary filename not available.
Serving web UI on http://localhost:57599

Notice that you need -http option, not -web. PProf.jl executes identical command itself (see this).

  • After the command, the default browser should be opened at localhost:57599, if not, you may enter the address manually in the browser.
  • Also, do not shut down your terminal.
  • I don’t know what “Main binary” warning means, perhaps for Julia code it may be ignored.

If you want to work remotely, see @jameson’s answer. Also, I don’t know, if my suggestion is reproducible on Windows. In case of Windows, I would setup all remotely.

P.S. I’ve found that PProf.jl uses a wrapper around binary pprof, so it’s shipped with PProf.jl. For me, pprof was located in .julia/artifacts/a-long-hash-code/bin/pprof.

1 Like
9

You need to port forward from your server, if you use VS code remote SSH to get in, you can open ports mid-session.

See docs - Developing on Remote Machines using SSH and Visual Studio Code

1 Like