Strobelight: A profiling service built on open source technology

We’re sharing details about Strobelight, Meta’s profiling orchestrator. Strobelight combines several technologies, many open source, into a single service that helps engineers at Meta improve efficiency and utilization across our fleet. Using Strobelight, we’ve seen significant efficiency wins, including one that has resulted in an estimated 15,000 servers’ worth of annual capacity savings. Strobelight, Meta’s profiling orchestrator, is not really one technology. It’s several (many open source) combined to make something that unlocks truly amazing efficiency wins. Strobelight is also not a single profiler but an orchestrator of many different profilers (even ad-hoc ones) that runs on all production hosts at Meta, collecting detailed information about CPU usage, memory allocations, and other performance metrics from running processes. Engineers and developers can use this information to identify performance and resource bottlenecks, optimize their code, and improve utilization. When ... Read full article.