Package trace

Overview ▾

Package trace contains facilities for programs to generate traces for the Go execution tracer.

Tracing runtime activities

The execution trace captures a wide range of execution events such as goroutine creation/blocking/unblocking, syscall enter/exit/block, GC-related events, changes of heap size, processor start/stop, etc. When CPU profiling is active, the execution tracer makes an effort to include those samples as well. A precise nanosecond-precision timestamp and a stack trace is captured for most events. The generated trace can be interpreted using `go tool trace`.

Support for tracing tests and benchmarks built with the standard testing package is built into `go test`. For example, the following command runs the test in the current directory and writes the trace file (trace.out).

go test -trace=trace.out

This runtime/trace package provides APIs to add equivalent tracing support to a standalone program. See the Example that demonstrates how to use this API to enable tracing.

There is also a standard HTTP interface to trace data. Adding the following line will install a handler under the /debug/pprof/trace URL to download a live trace:

import _ "net/http/pprof"

See the net/http/pprof package for more details about all of the debug endpoints installed by this import.

User annotation

Package trace provides user annotation APIs that can be used to log interesting events during execution.

There are three types of user annotations: log messages, regions, and tasks.

Log emits a timestamped message to the execution trace along with additional information such as the category of the message and which goroutine called Log. The execution tracer provides UIs to filter and group goroutines using the log category and the message supplied in Log.

A region is for logging a time interval during a goroutine's execution. By definition, a region starts and ends in the same goroutine. Regions can be nested to represent subintervals. For example, the following code records four regions in the execution trace to trace the durations of sequential steps in a cappuccino making operation.

trace.WithRegion(ctx, "makeCappuccino", func() {

   // orderID allows to identify a specific order
   // among many cappuccino order region records.
   trace.Log(ctx, "orderID", orderID)

   trace.WithRegion(ctx, "steamMilk", steamMilk)
   trace.WithRegion(ctx, "extractCoffee", extractCoffee)
   trace.WithRegion(ctx, "mixMilkCoffee", mixMilkCoffee)
})

A task is a higher-level component that aids tracing of logical operations such as an RPC request, an HTTP request, or an interesting local operation which may require multiple goroutines working together. Since tasks can involve multiple goroutines, they are tracked via a context.Context object. NewTask creates a new task and embeds it in the returned context.Context object. Log messages and regions are attached to the task, if any, in the Context passed to Log and WithRegion.

For example, assume that we decided to froth milk, extract coffee, and mix milk and coffee in separate goroutines. With a task, the trace tool can identify the goroutines involved in a specific cappuccino order.

ctx, task := trace.NewTask(ctx, "makeCappuccino")
trace.Log(ctx, "orderID", orderID)

milk := make(chan bool)
espresso := make(chan bool)

go func() {
        trace.WithRegion(ctx, "steamMilk", steamMilk)
        milk <- true
}()
go func() {
        trace.WithRegion(ctx, "extractCoffee", extractCoffee)
        espresso <- true
}()
go func() {
        defer task.End() // When assemble is done, the order is complete.
        <-espresso
        <-milk
        trace.WithRegion(ctx, "mixMilkCoffee", mixMilkCoffee)
}()

The trace tool computes the latency of a task by measuring the time between the task creation and the task end and provides latency distributions for each task type found in the trace.

Index ▾

Package files

annotation.go trace.go