Perb

perb automatically instruments your methods such that they show up when a ruby executable gets profiled with perf. it works by wrapping all methods with:

Perb::wrapper(<some_id>) do
    ... (your method code here)
end

For each method it JITs a small assembly function which just yields back to your ruby method. The assembly looks like this:

push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
xor rdi, rdi
call rb_sys::rb_yield
leave
ret

Then, we produce a perf map file (as described here) which maps the address of the JITed assembly to the ruby function we are wrapping. This way perf can show ruby function names (and their location in the file system) in its output.

Inspired by the work done to do something similar for Python, which is explained here

Installation

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add perb

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install perb

Usage

In order for this to work, you need ruby to be compiled with CFLAGS="-fno-omit-frame-pointer -mno-omit-leaf-frame-pointer" and also all your native extensions to do so as well. For rust you want: RUSTFLAGS="-C force-frame-pointers=yes"

Without this you will see incorrect perf results, as perf won't be able to profile correctly your program.

Having done this, you can setup perb with require "perb/setup" which should be required before all the code that you want to be able to profile. See bin/perf_test as an example. Then you can just:

perf record -g <your-ruby-executable>

and you should be able to profile native and ruby code with one profiler (perf).

Caveats

I've noticed that perf drops stack frames when the stack gets really deep, which results in weird results. Given that the call graphs that we are recording are fairly convoluted (they also include all the internals of the Ruby VM) this can happen quite quickly. You should be able to increase such limit with:

sudo sysctl kernel.perf_event_max_stack=<stack-size>

This currently will break anything that patches load_iseq like bootsnap.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/Maaarcocr/perb. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Perb project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.