How we wrote a Python profiler | Datadog

Datadog built a statistical profiler for Python to address the limitations of deterministic profilers like cProfile for production environments. The profiler is designed with minimal overhead and simple deployment, comprising a recorder, collectors (stack, memory, lock), an exporter using the pprof format, and a scheduler. The stack collector, partially written in C with Cython, gathers execution stack information for Python threads and dynamically adjusts its polling rate to manage CPU overhead. Memory and lock collectors are also included to track allocations and lock contention.