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.

🚀 We recently announced our NVIDIA CUDA always-on profiler. Check out this blog on how to try it out super quickly with your CUDA workload today!🧊 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

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...

🧊 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

Sometimes an interface is so ubiquitous that performance limitations inherent to its design are just accepted. This has been our experience with Parquet. We switched to Vortex which aligned much better with our needs and saw a 70% performance improvement across the board. Read more below 👇

Ever wondered how your browser devtools jumps from bundle.min.js:1:27698 → src/index.ts:73:16? 🧊 We unpack the internals of JS Source Maps: Base64 VLQ encoding, mapping deltas, and how your original TS code gets reconstructed from minified bundles. 🔗 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

Introducing the world's first open source continuous NVIDIA CUDA profiler. Zero code changes required, low overhead, and always on.

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

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...

I wrote about why we should treat German string encoding/StringViews as Just Another Encoding™

Do any database systems "columnarize" the German string encoding so rather than storing a 16-byte view for each element which includes length+prefix+pointer you'd store all lengths together, prefixes together etc...? Seems like prefix operations would be more SIMD friendly.

The hardest part about writing a blog post is the introduction. Here I am, 4 hours later.

Tame the OOM killer with OOMProf, the new eBPF memory profiler for Go programs being taken out by the kernels OOM killer! www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

We're excited to share that the Parca Agent now works offline! Store CPU profiles locally when disconnected, upload when ready. Because not all computing happens in data centers. Read how we built it: www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

New storage format RFC in the works 👀 Early preview:

🚀 Today, we're excited to launch Off-CPU profiling! Check out our blog on what we needed to do to make it most useful and how you can get started with it! 🧊 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

@metalmatze.de built an MCP server so you can hook up your agent to your profiling data. Check it out!

📔Writing our Rust database from scratch gave us a golden opportunity to implement deterministic simulation testing as a core feature. Learn about the architecture that gives us full control over DST ingredients. 🧊 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

Writing our Rust database from scratch gave us a golden opportunity to implement deterministic simulation testing as a core feature. I wrote a blog post about the architecture that gives us full control over concurrency, time, randomness, and failure injection. (link in comment)

If you're serious about performance, you need continuous profiling in your life

Nice read about how maybe it's time to delete some tests (not your DST test though): andre.arko.net/2025/06/30/y...

This was a fun read. Speed runs building a cloud DB. Hill climbing the design can lead to a local maximum. Lots of lessons. Now I need to read their next post on the new one!

Looking forward to speaking at @eurorust.eu about the deterministic simulation testing we're doing at @polarsignals.com!

Our very own @asubiotto.bsky.social for the first time publicly talking about the DST approach we’re taking in our new database. (Blog post coming soon as well!)

You know that urge to rewrite your database in Rust? We gave in. (Link in comment)

Off to Systems Distributed. See you in Amsterdam!

Quis verificabit ipsos verificatores?

Claude code seems to love debugging by pointing at random code paths it doesn't understand and saying "the root cause is now clear"

We've been working hard to enhance our continuous profiling for GPUs. Learn about more metrics (like PCIe throughput) and the upcoming On-GPU profiles. If you are attending ai.engineer, come and stop by our booth S18 to discuss all of these features! www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

⚡ Flamecharts/Iciclecharts are now available on all workloads, not just the Polar Signals GPU profiling experience! Check out the blog on what Flamecharts/Iciclecharts are and how to use them on Polar Signals! 🧊 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

No biggie, just Wikimedia running Pyrra: slo.wikimedia.org 😳😎🥳 Pretty great feeling to see how far this free time project has come. Wow.

Had the great pleasure tonight of being with Brown CS professor Tom Doeppner, who is retiring after an extraordinary 49 years of teaching. Tom -- and his legendary OS course, CS169 -- inspired multiple generations of practitioners. Thank you, Tom!

🔬 We've been researching PGO with sampling profiling data for Rust (and LLVM more generally) at Polar Signals. Check out what Tommy has found so far and stay tuned for the next posts in this series! 🧊 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

🦀 Today, we're introducing the ability to attach arbitrary metadata to Profiling data with Async-Rust! Use this to attach the distributed tracing ID and more to your Profiling data! 🔍 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

Is it just me or does AI model quality degrade over time?

Last day of #KubeCon! Come over to our booth to check out our latest GPU profiling demo and get some cool 🧊Polar Signals SWAG!

📢 Today on the blog: Check out how @turbopuffer.bsky.social uses Polar Signals Cloud to deliver a consistently high-performance vector search experience to their customers! 📈 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

Anyone have office space to spare for Monday in London pre-KubeCon?

I with just released about 2 years of work on improving compression with a fixed encoding LZ77 style compressor for #golang Our goal was to improve compression by combining and tweaking the best aspects of LZ4 and Snappy. Check it out: github.com/minio/minlz

Came back from the @polarsignals.com two keycaps richer

📣 New on the blog: Check out this exciting case study with @convex.dev, sharing how they tackled unexpected latency and memory regressions in production! #PerformanceMatters #ContinuousProfiling #Convex #Rust

A case study worth reading on how @polarsignals.com helped @s2.dev double throughput by highlighting performance bottlenecks:

"Make this as user hostile as possible" -- ancient otel proverb

I keep on being surprised by how prevalent the notion is that upgrading your database implies database downtime. This is not the way.

Curious about Continuous Profiling and how it can level up your Observability game? Come join me next week Wednesday at 4 PM CET / 10 AM EST and learn all about it! Whether you're an expert or a beginner I promise you'll learn something new! See you there! events.polarsignals.com/continuous-p...

Pretty cool. Definitely something that would've been useful on multiple occasions.

Niv Dayan is uploading his lectures from CSC2525 Research Topics in Database Management to YouTube. Great set of topics, and first couple videos are well presented and easy introductions to the material! Course: www.nivdayan.net/res... Channel: www.youtube.com/@niv...

[email protected], we often get questions about how continuous profiling is different from traditional APM tools. If you're free Feb 5 at 10:00 EST/16:00 CET, @brancz.com will be diving deeper into how these differ and complement each other. Register here:

I struggled to find a good post that explains the actual mechanics of Z-Ordering (sort of like an index for delta lakes) rather than why or how to use it. Finally found this post and thought it was worth sharing: https://buff.ly/4gZPhkp