Zero-instrumentation eBPF tooling promises instant insights, but making it reliable and lightweight is a serious challenge. This talk shows how CNCF Pixie profiled its own memory use, uncovered issues with DWARF-intensive Uprobes, and redesigned them to cut memory usage while preserving probe stability. We’ll cover design patterns for memory-lean Uprobe instrumentation, using pprof directly in your application, and how to balance reliability and efficiency instead of choosing between them.
Dom is a core maintainer of the Pixie open source project and founder/CEO at Cosmic. He previously worked at Crowdstrike, focusing on the eBPF Linux sensor, and at New Relic, working on Pixie full-time. Dom first began building observability tooling at Twitter, where he scaled the internally developed time series database to 30B active time series. During his time at Twitter, he became an active contributor to Pixie, expanding its TLS tracing to support JVM-based services.
