rbkit

Rbkit

rbkit is a Ruby gem that plugs into your ruby process, taps profiling data in realtime and sends it across the wire to the rbkit-client as packed messages.

Usage

Add rbkit to Gemfile

Add the following to the project's Gemfiles

gem 'rbkit', path: <RBKIT_PATH>

and run bundle install

Installation without Rubygems

You can also install rbkit without bundler/rubygems. This can be useful, if you are profiling a Ruby app where you want to measure overhead of Rubygems/Bundler.

Just clone the repository or download from a release tag and run:

# Run from root of rbkit directory.
~> ruby setup.rb

This should install rbkit in ruby's site_dir and then you don't need rbkit added to your Gemfile for requiring rbkit.

Inject rbkit into code

Wherever you want to start profiling, add the following :

require 'rbkit' # Not needed in Rails
Rbkit.start_server

If using Rails, and you want to measure everything from the boot process, a good place to put this would be at the end of config/boot.rb.

Rbkit API

Rbkit.start_server(pub_port: nil, request_port: nil)

Starts the Rbkit server and waits for a client to connect and issue commands to the request_port, until then there's zero performance overhead. Profiling data is sent asynchronously over pub_port. This method can be called early in a ruby application so that whenever profiling needs to be done, the client can attach itself to the inactive server, do the profiling and leave. Returns true if server was started successfully.

argument	valid values	default value	description
pub_port	nil, fixnum	nil	Override default message publishing port of 5555
request_port	nil, fixnum	nil	Override default command listener port of 5556

Rbkit.start_profiling(pub_port: nil, request_port: nil, enable_object_trace: true, enable_gc_stats: true)

Starts the server with all tracepoints enabled by default. User can optionally disable tracepoints using the optional arguments. This method can be used to profile the startup process of a ruby application where sending commands from the client to enable profiling is not feasible. Returns true if server was started successfully.

Arguments:

argument	valid values	default value	description
pub_port	nil, fixnum	nil	Override default message publishing port of 5555
request_port	nil, fixnum	nil	Override default command listener port of 5556
enable_object_trace	true/false	true	Enables object creation/deletion events
enable_gc_stats	true/false	true	Enables GC stats which is sent every 5 seconds

Development

Install zmq and msgpack

If zmq and msgpack are not installed, Rbkit automatically downloads and installs the two libraries from source during gem installation. But if you are developing Rbkit, it makes sense to have these preinstalled:

On OSX - Using homebrew following command should suffice:

~> brew install zeromq
~> brew install msgpack

On Linux - we recommend to download these libraries from their respective home pages and manually compiling and installing.

Clone the repo

git clone [e-mail]:code-mancers/rbkit.git

We'll call this <RBKIT_PATH>.

Set RBKIT_DEV environment flag

Set the environment variable RBKIT_DEV to true. If using bash, put export RBKIT_DEV=true in your ~/.bashrc.

This compiles the C extension with debug flag and also sets a macro named RBKIT_DEV inside the C extension.

Compile the C extension

Two ways to do this :

Using rake

cd <RBKIT_PATH>
bundle install
bundle exec rake compile

Or do it manually

cd <RBKIT_PATH/ext>
ruby extconf.rb
make
# Create a symlink at `lib/rbkit_tracer.bundle` (or .so if on linux)
# that points to `ext/rbkit_tracer.bundle`
# (in order to use `rbkit` gem in Gemfiles using `path` option)

TODO

TODOs are tracked as github issues.