What an awesome year at Polar Signals! Some highlights: 📈 >10x data scale ⚡️ Shipped always-on GPU profiling 🦀 Shipped our new Rust/DataFusion/Vortex DB Feeling lucky to get to work with such an incredible team & customers like Vercel, Notion, Canonical, Turbopuffer and more! 2026, we're ready!

We cut cross-zone traffic for SLO monitoring by 90% using Prometheus subquery optimization. The trick: pre-aggregate data locally instead of shuffling 55M raw samples to Thanos queriers. Coming soon to Pyrra! 🚀 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

Just as I was thinking Unifi was getting ahead of Mikrotik, they release this absolute beast of a switch. Modern computing hardware is pretty awesome. mikrotik.com/product/crs8...

A simple 50-line code change saves us 30% of CPU across our whole infrastructure. This is the magic of system-wide profiling with @polarsignals.com. Easy to spot, easy to fix.

It's super easy to get started with profiling your NVIDIA CUDA workload, you don't even need to modify it!

Happy to share that I've been nominated to the Vortex Technical Steering Committee! It's been fun and productive switching to Vortex from Parquet as our storage format @polarsignals.com and I'm excited to continue contributing to the Vortex project. vortex.dev/blog/novembe...

We're big believers of USDTs at Polar Signals, and here is both a deep dive and a bit of detail on how we used them to build the NVIDIA CUDA Profiler we announced a few weeks ago!

Next.js 16 + turbopack took our frontend builds from 5-7m down to just over 2m. This means faster speed of iteration in development and faster CI. Performance is UX. Performance is DX. Performance is a feature.

🧊 New on the Polar Signals Blog — Our Delta Lake Fork Purpose-built for our continuous profiling product. In our latest post, we walk through how Delta Lake works, and the changes we've made to improve performance for our product. 👉 Read the full post: buff.ly/KwHINtO

another cloudflare outage?

I just realized that the feedback loop we created for our new database is its real superpower. Since *everything*, including the catalog, is on object storage, it allows us to validate/try out things super fast because everything can act independently against object storage.

Just the move from parquet to vortex gave us a massive perf boost. But more importantly, it opens up the path for way more. So much low hanging fruit now!

One of our most popular features, now available with nodejs! Also a sneaky customer reference 👀

It's so awesome that we can use our own product every single day at Polar Signals to understand our own software. I want to get into the rhythm and do more of these. What do you think? How would you have troubleshooted this, and could you have understood what's going on in less than 1min?

Good morning #KubeCon! We are excited to meet all of you and talk about performance! 🚀 Stop by our booth at 1360 next to the Demo Theatre to learn more about CPU, GPU, and memory profiling in production! 🧑‍💻

Is there some global load-balancing product out there that's less expensive than Google Cloud's load balancer? ($0.008/GiB)

You thought docker is causing a lot of wasted space on your disk? Try working on a moderately sized Rust codebase that produces 10 binaries 🫠

Never thought I'd say this, but for the first time in a decade, I'm working on a database that can just be queried with SQL, and it's kind of nice 😅

[email protected] has really outdone himself with the animated parts of this blog post!

I was disappointed with the Unifi lineup from Ubiquiti for some time, but the new products are looking pretty awesome! (APs, 10GbE fiber gateway, 10GbE switches with PoE++) Mikrotik is lagging behind for the first time in some time for me!

1% across the board and significantly more for some workloads! Mad props to Canonical for doing the non flashy but impactful important work that only few companies on the planet can! discourse.ubuntu.com/t/introducin...

We made a bit of a dumb thing early on at Polar Signals where we accidentally created a critical GCS bucket as multi-region. But today I learned about Bucket relocation (launched in 2024). Very timely! docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs...

I noticed that cross-zone traffic has once again crept up on us at Polar Signals, so I dusted off kubezonnet, and implemented a few new features/bug fixes as I was troubleshooting. I present v0.2.0, which we just used to cut 62% of cross-zone traffic. Real money saved. github.com/polarsignals...

We're on the HN front page with our post on the NVIDIA GPU profiler we created. Please help us spread the word and comment if you have any questions!

It's absolutely crazy what computers are capable of when we produce software that works with hardware in mind.

The NVIDIA RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell with 24GB is looking quite interesting as a workstation GPU as an alternative to a Spark DGX. Obviously not quite apples to apples with different memory speed and sizes but still, 24gb is large enough to do interesting things with.

I had a great time talking about GPU profiling at Ubuntu Summit! Thanks everyone for joining!

"We're seeing more Rust recently", "Although 95 % of CUDA workflows use Python" @brancz.com from @polarsignals.com at #UbuntuSummit2510 #UbuntuSummit

If you're at #UbuntuSummit Thursday and Friday, come hear me speak about how we created the world's first open-source low-overhead always-on #NVIDIA #CUDA Profiler! discourse.ubuntu.com/t/infrastruc... #performance #GPU

I could not be more excited about this. To our knowledge, the world's first open-source low-overhead always-on GPU profiler! As always, zero-instrumentation and powered by #eBPF!

Quick one-hour weekend experiment, and I'm already visualizing our CI infrastructure at Polar Signals as distributed traces in Jaeger! Already gave me insight that I didn't know before (our Rust tests are the critical path, not release binary build times)!

It's been that kind of a day ...

I don't know why I have to rediscover this over and over, but reducing CI time is such an incredible productivity booster; every second shaved off is worth the investment!

When did we go from "computers are not great at making use of all those cores" to "a lot of software scales linearly with the number of cores you give it". Not complaining, just feels like yesterday that we said the former statement a lot.

I have several services that use as much network bandwidth as is available to them on Kubernetes. But I need to prioritize or at least guarantee some amount of bandwidth to a certain component. What are my options other than separate node pools?

Took advantage of the lunch break to replay this great talk by Alfonso Subiotto (@asubiotto.com) making the case for a State Machines based approach to Deterministic Simulation Testing, being used at @polarsignals.com, very interesting! Their inspiration for this: sled.rs/simulation

Figure out when the deploy happened 👀

So cool and parca.dev getting mentioned out of nowhere. Love to see it!

Google Mail moved the mark as unread button in the dropdown, and I hate it.

It's awesome to see the arrow project get support like this! medium.com/@QuantStack/...

Despite the ecosystem fragmentation, I'm excited to see more innovation in this space. For now we've firmly settled on Vortex, but happy to see that there are ideas being exchanged!

I have two workloads on the same Kubernetes node, and they are using as much CPU as is available to them on the system, but one workload is a background/batch task whereas the other is serving traffic. What’s the best way to strictly prioritize the serving process in Linux/Kubernetes?

Sure, there can be leaps that I don't see coming, but at the moment we've thoroughly come to the point where claude code/cursor works really well when we understand and describe the problem well, but leaving the thinking to it, completely and utterly fails. Does anyone else see it this way?

We open sourced a read-through cache for S3, called Cachey github.com/s2-streamsto...

I was at a complete loss for words when the message reached me this morning. Cherish the time you have with your loved ones. Han, my friend, you will be dearly missed. I will never forget the memories we’ve built together. github.com/cncf/memoria...

We're excited to be at @rustconf.com 2025! Let's talk about profiling Rust with zero compromise! #rustconf25

We recently made some performance improvements to our Flame Graph by implementing backend pre-computation and viewport culling. Read more in our latest blog post: www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

Another step closer to making our next-gen storage engine generally available to our customers. Today's milestone: It's now on par with our old storage, while we still have tons of low-hanging and well-understood fruit!

What do you think of our (possibly controversial) take?

Do I know anyone who has an AMD 9955HX? I’d love to know how much faster it is at compiling rust than my M1 Max.