Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

Tips for Rust Optimization and Profiling

1. std::mem::size_of returns the stack size of a type.

2. memuse contains traits for measuring the dynamic memory usage of Rust types.

3. The Rust Performance Book has a comprehensive guide on optimizing Rust code. Rust Performance Pitfalls discusses about some performance pitfalls that you want to avoid.

4. rustfilt demangles Rust symbol names using rustc-demangle .

CPU Profiling

not-perf

not-perf is a sampling CPU profiler for Linux.

pprof

Pprof is an internal perf tools for rust programs. It provides integration with Criterion which is the most popular benchmark tool in Rust. Please refer to pprof-rs/examples/criterion.rs for such an example. However, Criterion performs measuring/benchmarking instead of profiling by default. To generate profiling report/visualization, you can run the following command.

cargo bench --bench bench_main name_of_benchmark -- --profile-time

Valgrind

Valgrind is a great profiler for Rust applications. The crate cargo-valgrind provides integration of valgrind and cargo.

FlameGraph

FlameGraph is another good profiler for Rust applications which is has integration support for cargo.

Valgrind is preferred for several reasons.

1. Valgrind is easier to install, configure and use. Flamegraph relies on perf which is not user-friendly.

2. The Flamegraph project is no longer in active development.

3. Valgrind is more powerful and flexible and can be used for profiling other porgramming languages too.

puffin

puffin is a friendly little instrumentation profiler for Rust.

Memory Profiling

bytehound is the best available memory profiling tool for Rust currently.

bytehound

bytehound is a memory profiler for Linux.

dhat-rs

dhat-rs provides heap profiling and ad hoc profiling capabilities to Rust programs, similar to those provided by DHAT .

DHAT

DHAT is a dynamic heap analysis tool that comes with Valgrind.

heaptrack

heaptrack is a heap memory profiler for Linux

References

• CPU Profiling of Rust Applications Using Valgrind | misc/content/2022/01/cpu-profiling-rust-valgrind/cpu-profiling-rust-valgrind.markdown

• Profile Rust Applications Using Flamegraph | misc/content/2021/11/profile-rust-applications-using-flamegraph/profile-rust-applications-using-flamegraph.markdown

• Tips on Valgrind

• The Rust Performance Book - Profiling

• Rust Performance Pitfalls

• How To Write Fast Rust Code

• Top-Down performance analysis methodology

• Profile Rust Applications Using Valgrind

• Profile Rust Applications Using Flamegraph

• Rust Crate - profiling

• How-to Optimize Rust Programs on Linux

• Is it possible to print the callgraph of a Cargo workspace?

• Linux performance testing with perf, gprof and Valgrind