Julia Evans

Talk: Building a Ruby profiler

Last month I gave a talk at Localhost, the Recurse Center’s monthly talk series. My favourite thing about Localhost’s talk format is that speakers give relatively in depth talks about technical topics, and then people ask lots of questions at the end.

This talk is about the core of rbspy – how do we read memory out of the Ruby interpreter to figure out what function a Ruby process is running? How do we do that in a way that works across multiple Ruby versions? Do we need to stop the Ruby process to figure out what function is running?

The talk is 30 minutes and it’s followed by about 30 minutes of questions. The audio is a bit sketchy in places. Here’s the video:

Reverse engineering the Notability file format New zine: Profiling & tracing with perf!!