I recently talked with Frederic Branczyk. Fredric is the founder of Polar Signals, a new always-on, zero-instrumentation profiler. Before Polar Signals, Fredric spent time at Red Hat and CoreOS, where he worked on Kubernetes and Prometheus.

In this interview, Frederic and I break down Polar Signals’s architecture and its main components: Parca and FrostDB. Parca is of particular interest; it is able to achieve its minimally invasive profiling claims by using an eBPF filter that samples the entire OS’s stack at 19hz. Data is then passed to a server and stored into FrostDB, an embedded storage engine built on Datafusion and Parquet.

During the discussion, Frederic mentions several influential papers:

* Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers

* BOLT: A Practical Binary Optimizer for Data Centers and Beyond

* Propeller: A Profile Guided, Relinking Optimizer for Warehouse-Scale Applications

* Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications

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