How to Use Pyroscope for Continuous Performance Profiling in Microservices

When microservice architectures are deployed in production, issues such as high traffic can cause performance bottlenecks, high CPU usage, or memory leaks, and finding the root cause by inspecting logs and code can be time‑consuming.

This article introduces the open‑source continuous performance analysis platform Pyroscope , which helps quickly locate memory leaks and high‑CPU code.

What is Pyroscope?

Pyroscope is an open‑source continuous profiling platform that helps you:

Find performance problems in code

Resolve high CPU utilization

Detect and fix memory leaks

Understand application call trees

Track changes over time

It stores long‑term profiling data from many applications, offers low CPU overhead, high compression efficiency, low disk space requirements, and a fast UI.

Pyroscope Architecture

Pyroscope consists of two main components: Pyroscope Server and Pyroscope Agent .

Pyroscope Agent: records and aggregates runtime data from your application and sends it to the server. Supports Go, Python, Ruby, eBPF, Java, Rust, PHP, Node.js, .NET.

Pyroscope Server: processes, aggregates, and stores data from agents, enabling fast queries over any time range.

Integration with Rainbond

1. Integrate Pyroscope Agent: Install the Pyroscope Agent plugin via Rainbond, which launches

pyroscope.jar

using

java -javaagent:pyroscope.jar -jar app.jar

.

2. Depend on Pyroscope Server: Connect the microservice components that have the agent plugin to the Pyroscope Server.

Practical Steps

The following steps demonstrate the integration using the Pig microservice framework.

Deploy Spring Cloud Pig microservices.

Deploy Pyroscope Server.

Install and configure the Pyroscope Java Agent plugin.

Establish dependency between microservices and Pyroscope.

Basic usage of Pyroscope.

1. Deploy Spring Cloud Pig

Install Spring Cloud Pig from the open‑source app store.

2. Deploy Pyroscope Server

Install Pyroscope Server from the app store.

3. Install Pyroscope Java Agent Plugin and Configure

Install the

Pyroscope-Java-Agent

plugin from the app store.

Enable the plugin for each microservice component.

Set environment variables, e.g.,

JAVA_OPTS=-javaagent:/agent/pyroscope.jar

and a unique

PYROSCOPE_APPLICATION_NAME

such as

pig.auth

.

4. Create Dependency Between Microservices and Pyroscope

Add a dependency link from each microservice component to the Pyroscope Server, switch to orchestration mode, and restart components to activate the relationship.

5. Basic Use of Pyroscope

Access the UI at port 4040. In Single View select an application to see flame graphs or tables for a chosen time range. Comparison View lets you compare different periods, and Diff View highlights differences, which is useful for diagnosing CPU spikes or memory leaks.

Conclusion

Pyroscope can also be combined with Jaeger and integrated into the Jaeger UI.

Reference Links

Pyroscope: https://pyroscope.io/

Rainbond Quick Install: https://www.rainbond.com/docs/quick-start/quick-install/

Jaeger UI Integration: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/jaeger-ui