Profiling Erlang Code with fprof

This is the second article in the troubleshooting. In this article, we will look into the performance analysis for the applications. When you are developing the code, performance is very important.

To scale the application, to maintain the reliability of the application, you need to analyze the performance of your code and need to profile your code.

We will look into profiling the Erlang application using fprof and how to analyze its output. frpof is the tool provided with the Erlang, so you need not to install it separately.

What is fprof?

It provides the most detailed information about where the program time is spent, but it significantly slows down the program it profiles. It is a standard tool to profile the code.

Now, we will log in to Erlang Remote shell and start doing:

These steps will generate an analysis file in /tmp/application.analysis which contains the result of the analysis of your application.

Now, we will look into how to read this analysis file.

The file will look like this. The fields are:

Install kcachegrind on mac by:

Now, convert the output of the fprof to callgrind format by:

Now you can open the file in the qcachegrind app in mac. The visualization will look like:

You can get this kind of detailed analysis of the application with graphs.

P.S. This is one way to profile the erlang app. There are other ways to profile the Erlang application, which we will cover later.

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