Profiling kubectl

To profile kubectl the Go tools needs to be installed. The various kind of go profiles are described in the the pprof package documentation. A longer pprof tutorial can be found on the Go blog.

For kubectl, the two most interesting profiles are block (where do we spend time blocking, eg. waiting for I/O) and cpu.

We distribute a kubectl-instrumented package that supports two new command line options:

--profile='': Name of profile to capture. One of (cpu|heap|goroutine|threadcreate|block|mutex)

--profile-output='profile.pprof': Name of the file to write the profile to.

To generate a profile, use the --profile option:

$ kubectl-instrumented get nodes --profile=block

Generate a visualization of the profile with pprof. You will need to graphviz installed.

$ go tool pprof -png ./profile.pprof > profile.png