Profiling Node.js applications

This page describes how to modify your Node.js application to capture profiling data and have that data sent to your Google Cloud project. For general information about profiling, see Profiling concepts.

Profile types for Node.js:

Heap
Wall time

Supported Node.js language versions:

Node.js 14 or higher
For the Node.js release policy, see Release schedule.

Supported profiling agent versions:

The most recent release of the agent is supported. In general, releases older than one year aren't supported. We recommend that you use the most recently released version of the agent.

Supported operating systems:

Linux. Profiling Node.js applications is supported for Linux kernels whose standard C library is implemented with glibc or with musl. For configuration information specific to Linux Alpine kernels, see Running on Linux Alpine.

Supported environments:

Compute Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
App Engine flexible environment
App Engine standard environment
Outside of Google Cloud (For information on the additional configuration requirements, see Profiling applications running outside of Google Cloud.)

Enabling the Profiler API

Before you use the profiling agent, ensure that the underlying Profiler API is enabled. You can check the status of the API and enable it if necessary by using either the Google Cloud CLI or the Google Cloud console:

gcloud CLI

If you have not already installed the Google Cloud CLI on your workstation, see the Google Cloud CLI documentation.

Run the following command:

gcloud services enable cloudprofiler.googleapis.com

For more information, see gcloud services.

Google Cloud console

Enable the required API.
Enable the API
If API enabled is displayed, then the API is already enabled. If not, click the Enable button.

Grant IAM role to service account

If you are deploying your application on Google Cloud resources and if you are using the default service account and haven't modified the role grants to that service account, then you can skip this section.

If you do any of the following, then you need to grant the service account the IAM role of Cloud Profiler Agent (roles/cloudprofiler.agent):

You are using the default service account but modified its role grants.
You are using a user-created service account.
You are using using workload identity, grant the Cloud Profiler Agent role to the Kubernetes service account.

You can grant an IAM role to a service account by using the Google Cloud console or the Google Cloud CLI. For example, you could use the gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding command:

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding GCP_PROJECT_ID \
    --member serviceAccount:MY_SVC_ACCT_ID@GCP_PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
    --role roles/cloudprofiler.agent

Before you use the previous command, replace the following:

GCP_PROJECT_ID: Your project ID.
MY_SVC_ACCT_ID: The name of your service account.

For detailed information, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organization.

Using Cloud Profiler

In all of the supported environments, you use the Profiler by installing the package @google-cloud/profiler, adding a require statement to your application, and then deploying the application in the usual way.

Before you install `@google-cloud/profiler`

The package @google-cloud/profiler depends on a built-in module. Prebuilt binaries for this built-in module are available for Linux and Alpine Linux for Node 14 and 16. No additional dependencies are required. @google-cloud/profiler uses node-pre-gyp to determine which prebuilt binary to install.

When using @google-cloud/profiler on other environments that don't have prebuilt binaries, the module node-gyp is used to build binaries. For information about the dependencies required to build binaries with node-gyp, see node-gyp's installation documentation.

Installation

To install the latest version of Cloud Profiler, do the following:

    npm install --save @google-cloud/profiler

If you are also using the Trace agent, when you modify your application, import the Profiler package after the Trace agent package (@google-cloud/trace-agent).

Compute Engine

For Compute Engine, do the following:

Install the latest version of Cloud Profiler:
```
npm install --save @google-cloud/profiler
```
Modify your application require code to create a serviceContext object that assigns to service the name of the service being profiled. Optionally, you can assign to version the version of the service being profiled. See Service name and version arguments for more information on these configuration options:
```
require('@google-cloud/profiler').start({
  serviceContext: {
    service: 'your-service',
    version: '1.0.0',
  },
});
```

GKE

For GKE, do the following:

Modify your Dockerfile to install the Profiler package:

FROM node:10
...
RUN npm install @google-cloud/profiler

Modify your application require code to create a serviceContext object that assigns to service the name of the service being profiled. Optionally, you can assign to version the version of the service being profiled. See Service name and version arguments for more information on these configuration options:
```
require('@google-cloud/profiler').start({
  serviceContext: {
    service: 'your-service',
    version: '1.0.0',
  },
});
```

App Engine

For App Engine flexible environment and for App Engine standard environment, the require code is similar to the following:

require('@google-cloud/profiler').start();

In App Engine, the service and version parameters are derived from the environment, so you don't have to specify them. Therefore, you don't need to create a serviceContext object.

Analyzing data

After Profiler has collected data, you can view and analyze this data using the Profiler interface.

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Profiler page:

Go to Profiler

You can also find this page by using the search bar.

Service name and version arguments

When you load the Profiler agent, you specify a service-name argument and an optional service-version argument to configure it.

The service name lets Profiler collect profiling data for all replicas of that service. The profiler service ensures a collection rate of one profile per minute, on average, for each service name across each combination service versions and zones.

For example, if you have a service with two versions running across replicas in three zones, the profiler will create an average of 6 profiles per minute for that service.

If you use different service names for your replicas, then your service will be profiled more often than necessary, with a correspondingly higher overhead.

When selecting a service name:

Choose a name that clearly represents the service in your application architecture. The choice of service name is less important if you only run a single service or application. It is more important if your application runs as a set of micro-services, for example.
Make sure to not use any process-specific values, like a process ID, in the service-name string.
The service-name string must match this regular expression:

^[a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9_.]{0,253}[a-z0-9])?$

A good guideline is to use a static string like imageproc-service as the service name.

The service version is optional. If you specify the service version, Profiler can aggregate profiling information from multiple instances and display it correctly. It can be used to mark different versions of your services as they get deployed. The Profiler UI lets you filter the data by service version; this way, you can compare the performance of older and newer versions of the code.

The value of the service-version argument is a free-form string, but values for this argument typically look like version numbers, for example, 1.0.0 or 2.1.2.

Agent logging

The profiling agent can report logging information. To enable logging, set the logLevel option when starting the agent. The supported logLevel values are:

0: disables all agent logging.
1: enables error logging.
2: enables warning logging (default).
3: enables info logging.
4: enables debug logging.

Set the logLevel value in the same object that provides the service context:

require('@google-cloud/profiler').start({
    serviceContext: { ... }
    logLevel:       3
});

Running with Linux Alpine

The Node.js profiling agent for Linux Alpine is supported only for Google Kubernetes Engine configurations.

Build error

If you run npm install and the build fails with the following error, then your Dockerfile is missing some build dependencies:

ERR! stack Error: not found: make

To resolve this problem, add the following statement to your Dockerfile's build stage:

RUN apk add python3 g++ make

Authentication error

If you use Docker images that run with Linux Alpine (such as golang:alpine or just alpine), you might see the following authentication error:

connection error: desc = "transport: authentication handshake failed: x509: failed to load system roots and no roots provided"

Note that to see the error you must have agent logging enabled.

The error indicates that the Docker images with Linux Alpine don't have the root SSL certificates installed by default. Those certificates are necessary for the profiling agent to communicate with the profiler API. To resolve this error, add the following apk command to your Dockerfile:

FROM alpine
...
RUN apk add --no-cache ca-certificates

You then need to rebuild and redeploy your application.

Known issues

The profiling agent for Node.js interferes with the normal exit of the program; it can take up to an hour for the program to exit after all the tasks in the program have completed. When you issue a SIGINT, for example by using Ctrl-C, this causes the process to terminate gracefully.