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Show HN: Goroutine-analyzer: A visual goroutine stack dump debugging tool

github.com

73 pointsadhocpotato9 comments

Definitely seems like a useful tool...being in java definitely is a bummer though, makes it harder to integrate into the ecosystem.

I wish the go runtime would allow adding annotations to stack frames. just something simple to attach key/value pairs to a frame, or something. Enough to give the goroutine a name.

runtime/trace gets close to it by annotating the context with a task/region, but if the trace hadn't been started before the task starts, then it's not going to show up anywhere.

Does pprof.Do address that use case?

https://pkg.go.dev/runtime/pprof#Do

very possibly! thanks, I totally missed those being added! I'll have to play around with them a bit

I wrote a tool to help dig into goroutine stack dumps from customer deployments. One of the things the open source project (https://github.com/openziti/ziti) I work on does is mesh networking. This has been very helpful for looking at goroutines from multiple processes, debugging distributed systems issues.

It can:

  * Load multiple stackdumps
  * Group similar goroutines automatically or manually
  * Group goroutines by regular expression

It is written in Java, because I needed a tool and I've done Java UIs in the past. Since I do Go backend development I figured I'd spend my time getting the tool written.

We also use a Go agent library (https://github.com/openziti/agent) which helps us gather stack dumps (and pprof dumps, etc) at runtime.

Not a criticism but did you consider any of the Golang libraries for doing user interfaces (DearImGUI is what I’m looking at now).

I did poke around for a bit, but I really needed the tool, and I knew it would be days of work if I learned a new tool and hours if I stuck with what I knew.

My coworker Andrew did start a similar tool, which is here: https://github.com/andrewpmartinez/grid and uses https://github.com/AllenDang/giu for the UI.

Next time I need a feature I probably take a look at that and see what the model looks like and and how straightforward it is to work with.

https://github.com/bcicen/grmon

grmon covers some of the functionality and is not Java based.

That's an interesting application. I tend to use an IDE if I'm debugging in realtime and otherwise I'm getting stackdumps from the support org.

For CLI goroutine analysis there's another tool: https://github.com/linuxerwang/goroutine-inspect which is pretty good.

I think if I do a rewrite it might make more sense to go the web route, like the go tool pprof UIs.

> The tool is written in Java for expediency on the UI front.

I never thought I would live to see the day these words were unironically authored.

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