Files
firezone/rust/README.md
Thomas Eizinger 5bf3230c62 docs(connlib): add profiling instructions (#6643)
Documents profiling instructions that I've figured out over the last
couple of days. Since Rust 1.79, the standard library is compiled with
frame pointers enabled [0]. Grabbing stack-trace information from the
frame pointer makes profiling much easier because the data is just there
in-line. Using debug information (via `dwarf`) is also possible but
requires post-processing of the performance profile with `addr2line`
(`perf script` does that automatically). This can take multiple minutes
or longer, depending on the sampling frequency of the captured
performance data. This makes benchmarking almost infeasible because the
feedback loop is simply too long. Using frame pointers is a much nicer
experience.

The downside is that the application themselves also needs to be
compiled with frame pointers. We achieve that by setting the appropriate
compiler option in `.cargo/config.toml`. Ubuntu [1], Fedora [2] and Arch
[3] also ship all of their code with frame pointers enabled. Also, tech
giants such as Google & Meta have been running their systems with frame
pointers on-by-default for years [4].

[0]:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/06/13/Rust-1.79.0.html#frame-pointers-enabled-in-standard-library-builds
[1]:
https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-17/the-return-of-the-frame-pointers.html
[2]: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2923
[3]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/26
[4]:
https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-17/the-return-of-the-frame-pointers.html
2024-09-10 14:00:00 +00:00

1.7 KiB

Rust development guide

Firezone uses Rust for all data plane components. This directory contains the Linux and Windows clients, and low-level networking implementations related to STUN/TURN.

We target the last stable release of Rust using rust-toolchain.toml. If you are using rustup, that is automatically handled for you. Otherwise, ensure you have the latest stable version of Rust installed.

Reading Client logs

The Client logs are written as JSONL for machine-readability.

To make them more human-friendly, pipe them through jq like this:

cd path/to/logs  # e.g. `$HOME/.cache/dev.firezone.client/data/logs` on Linux
cat *.log | jq -r '"\(.time) \(.severity) \(.message)"'

Resulting in, e.g.

2024-04-01T18:25:47.237661392Z INFO started log
2024-04-01T18:25:47.238193266Z INFO GIT_VERSION = 1.0.0-pre.11-35-gcc0d43531
2024-04-01T18:25:48.295243016Z INFO No token / actor_name on disk, starting in signed-out state
2024-04-01T18:25:48.295360641Z INFO null

Benchmarking on Linux

The recommended way for benchmarking any of the Rust components is Linux' perf utility. For example, to attach to a running application, do:

  1. Ensure the binary you are profiling is compiled with the bench profile.
  2. sudo perf perf record -g --freq 10000 --pid $(pgrep <your-binary>).
  3. Run the speed test or whatever load-inducing task you want to measure.
  4. sudo perf script > profile.perf
  5. Open profiler.firefox.com and load profile.perf

Instead of attaching to a process with --pid, you can also specify the path to executable directly. That is useful if you want to capture perf data for a test or a micro-benchmark.