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      I love this post for the tools and real world graphs shown. And it also answers my fear when using tracing on actix-web: Yes you can actually leak memory if the tracing isn’t ended after every request.

      Edit: What I’m missing though is a good frontend for tracing. I’ve seen jaeger for opentelemetry, but it doesn’t show as much info as I’d like. (How much time does function X take over multiple calls for example.)

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        Take a look at Grafana Tempo.

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      In the beginning of the “What Do You Mean You Leak a Bunch of Memory” section, it mentions that the Go garbage collector is generational. That’s actually not true.

      What happens in Go is that the compiler uses escape analysis to place a bunch of allocations on the stack, which means that the GC doesn’t have to look at any of those allocations.

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      This is the second tracing-related memory leak post I’ve seen recently (I don’t have the other one handy but it was due to holding spans over await points IIRC). Makes me a bit nervous to dig into tracing when regular logging seems to “just work”.

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        I’d say look up how to do tracing with your framework of choice, ask some people on irc discord and you’ll be fine. Just don’t ship a custom tracer, unless you’re willing to deal with that.

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        I am a big fan of tracing, and I’m not to spooked by the possibility of leaks. As long as you have a graph of your memory usage, and you can overlay a deploy event bar on that graph you can spot a big leak right away. At least in NodeJS land, upgrading to a new anything ever may introduce a leak, and dd-trace specifically (datadog’s library) is fraught with this issue. So, we stare at the graph once in a while and track down the source. Not too bad.