A deep dive into how JavaScript source maps work under the hood, with examples showing how all the pieces fit together.

Low-Overhead Profiling of GPUs with USDT Probes and eBPF

How we improved our Flame Graph rendering by moving computation to the backend.

And why I don't want my database to choose the best encoding for me (yet)

Using eBPF to record your programs dying breathes

Collect and upload profiles -- even without a network connection

How Off-CPU profiling works and how to get the most out of it

A step-by-step guide to achieving reproducible builds with Next.js.

Introducing Remote MCP Support in Polar Signals Cloud

How we designed our database for complete control over concurrency, time, randomness, and failure injection.

Application Performance engineering debt could live a long time without noticed and cause a significant overhead in developing new features, performance and the cost of operation.

Bringing what we've learned to our next generation database.

What we learned from building a database

Attending ai.engineer 2025 in San Francisco

A deep dive into the time-aware visualization that complements traditional flame graphs in performance profiling.

Exploring how well the various forms of PGO work

How we added a Markdown editor to our Sanity setup and other improvements

Why profiling data is low-risk, high-value observability

Record and view profiling data from GitHub Actions runs easier than ever before!

Correlate profiles with arbitrary application-specific metadata in async Rust applications

Making Polar Signals Pricing more predictable and transparent

Introducing Continuous GPU Profiling: Get Performance Insights Over Time

Case Study: How turbopuffer leverages Polar Signals for Continuous Profiling

"High tail latency for one of our customers, was diagnosed immediately by seeing a large On-CPU time span"

“68.37% of CPU [...] with a one-line code change [...] went down to 31.82%”

Reinforcing our unwavering commitment to robust security

How we got our cloud bill under control

How we scrape callstack information from the LuaJIT engine for profiling

Filter and aggregate profiles by whatever dimensions make sense for your application

Polar Signals has achieved SOC2 Type 1 compliance, reinforcing our commitment to data security and customer trust.

Polar Signals Is Organizing PromCon EU 2024 in Berlin!

A new way to streamline profiling with predefined label names

A new and easier way to filter profiles on Polar Signals Cloud

Provides an overview of the processing status of your project's debug artifacts, such as debuginfo, executables, or sources.

The Parca project is embracing OpenTelemetry

We have shipped Relative Comparisons

Allows you to aggregate your profiling metrics across processes by grouping them by specific labels.

A new intuitive way to explore the control flow through specific functions in your application.

We've revamped our filtering by binary feature to be more intuitive and functional!

How we used WASM and some Go runtime modifications to run deterministic simulation tests against FrostDB

Attending KubeCon EU 2024 in Paris, France.

How we connected the worlds of tracing and profiling using Parca Agent, the eBPF-based profiler.

Insights into how much profiling data your projects are sending for an even more predictable billing.

Debugging memory leaks and usage systematically in Rust

A Collaborative Leap Forward with Canonical

Visualize differential Icicle graphs from two shared profiles.

Why dynamic dispatch is necessary and how to fix it with devirtualizing and PGO.

Scope requests with pre-defined filters and gain precise control over your profiling data!

Preview shared profiling data and keep a history of your shared profiles!

ARMing your favourite DWARF Unwinder

We're ready to share our product with the world!

Dive into the internals of profiling interpreted Python and Ruby code using eBPF

A look at profiling Modular's Mojo language.

A look at an exciting new feature in Polar Signals Cloud: Source View.

Or: A tale of handling unexpected behaviour by the v8 runtime.

Attending KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Say goodbye to taking screenshots of flame graphs/profile data. Now you can embed the interactive profiles directly in any website.

Flame graphs and icicle graphs are a great way to visualize performance profiles. In this post, we will learn how to read and interpret them.

How we improved our database query performance by 80% and the intuition behind the changes that led to this improvement

We have exciting updates in this release, including improved JIT symbolization, reliability and quality improvements, step querying, and more!

A journey through undocumented behavior.

Attending FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels.

Parca Agent is our open source, always-on eBPF-based continuous profiler. In this article, we will learn some of the concepts behind Parca Agent and use it to profile our system.

Looking at some exciting features that recently landed in Parca.

The tradeoffs and considerations building continuous, fleet-wide profilers.

Deep dive into the new DWARF-based stack unwinder using eBPF.

Open-Source Parca Agent is adding support for native applications compiled without frame pointers.

Parca in Grafana without having to install a plugin!

Attending KubeCon NA 2022 in Detroit, USA.

You asked for it, we delivered.

Good news! pprof.me, our free profile sharing service, has got a shiny new look and feel. It's now easier than ever to share and visualize your profiles with the world.

Making code faster without modifying it using Profile-Guided Optimizations.

An example of using continuous profiling to inform code improvements.

How we re-architected Parca Agent to profile every process on the host and made it more scalable in the process.

Polar Signals is sponsoring open-source developers.

We'll talk about what is HTTP 103 (Early Hints), how it can help speed up the web.

FrostDB is an embedded columnar database built for observability data. This article will explore FrostDB's potential by using it in Prometheus.

Parca is our open source, always-on eBPF-based continuous profiler. In this article, we'll learn some of the concepts behind Parca and use it to profile our system.

gRPC is a new protocol for building a backend for our frontend. In this article, we'll learn how we use gRPC and gRPC-web to build our frontend at Polar Signals.

We made a mistake in naming our open-source in-memory columnar database.

How training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has helped me become a better programmer

Attending KubeCon EU 2022 in Valencia, Spain.

Continuous profiling needed a columnar database, so we built it.

We will learn how to profile your Next.js/Node.js apps with Parca and how it helps you to go back in time and identify the root cause for the irregular bottlenecks in your application's performance.

In a previous post we detailed how we build our APIs here at Polar Signals. But we're going back to basics, in this tutorial we'll teach you how to build a small App from API to implementation.

Lerna and Yarn Workspaces gives us the ability to build and publish libraries and apps in a single repository (a.k.a. Monorepo). In this article we'll see how to publish UI components from a monorepo.

How profilers and debuggers translate machine addresses to human-readable symbolic names

How profilers and debuggers translate machine addresses to human-readable symbolic names

All about function inlining, how it helps us create performant software, how we can learn to work with it, and how it influences profiling.

Tools and strategies that we use to build APIs that we love at Polar Signals.

Thoughts on how early company culture shapes the future of it.

P.S. We got funded!

Building pprof profiles from scratch using Go

Learn how to demystify Pprof Labels using Go

Continuously profiling your applications without having to make modifications!

Our first major feature since our product launch: cumulative profiling metrics!

Our first publicly available service, to upload and share pprof profiles.

Since founding Polar Signals, we have been heads down working on our first product, and today we are beyond excited to share it with you!