Hunting down a C memory leak in a Go program (2021)

Hunting down a C memory leak in a Go program A story of metrics, confusion, and eBPF. KJ Tsanaktsidis Follow 10 min read · Oct 7, 2021 -- 5 Listen Share What it feels like when your app is leaking memory Introduction Over the last few years at Zendesk, both Go and Kafka have been increasingly growing in importance in our architecture. It was of course inevitable that they should meet, and so various teams have been writing Kafka consumers and producers in Go of late. There are a few different library options for building Kafka apps in Go, but we’ve been trying to standardise on using confluent-kafka-go, which is built on the official librdkafka C library using the cgo package. Leveraging the existing C library means that it gets support for bug fixes and new broker features alongside all other language bindings. Of course, with the good parts of C (sharing common functionality between languages), come the bad parts of C (debugging memory issues….). Shortly after deploying our firs ... Read full article.