Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Nominate a specific, canonical extension for pprof files

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#992 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
go
Domain
documentation, performance

Research direction

Use PerfettoMatchUtil.java as the referenced example, then locate pprof documentation that currently uses .pb or .pb.gz examples. Update the relevant examples to the proposed .pprof and .pprof.gz extensions, with completion shown when the documentation consistently presents those as canonical and distinguishing.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi, over on internal bug b/487062289 I'm working on benchmarks that output a .pprof file into sponge.

I'd like to have a button where you can click from the benchmark results to go to the pprof web UI. We already have this for Perfetto, it's nice.

I need to match for pprof files. For Perfetto, we have a PerfettoMatchUtil.java:

  private static final ImmutableSet<String> PERFETTO_EXTENSIONS =
      ImmutableSet.of(
          ".pftrace.gz", // UTP Perfetto Plugin
          ".pftrace",
          "_perfetto.pb.gz",
          "_perfetto.pb",
          ".perfetto-trace.gz", // Extension used in Perfetto docs
          ".perfetto-trace");

It's a bit of a mess (indicating they could have chosen a canonical extension earlier), but it works.

I'd like a canonical, distinguishing file extension for pprof profiles. But I need a file extension matcher that doesn't give me too many false positives.

There's a lot of talk in pprof about outputting .pb and .pb.gz. These are perhaps canonical, but not distinct from the myriad other wireformat protocol buffer formats.

Not distinct enough to offer a 'open in pprof' link from generic testing infrastructure; they'd probably have too many false positives.

I propose we just declare that pprof files canonically use extensions:

  • foo.pprof
  • foo.pprof.gz

And we update the docs that talk about .pb .pb.gz to use these as examples.

Thoughts?

Dominant language
Go
Stars
9.3k
Forks
682
Avg merge
2d 4h
Merged PRs (30d)
11

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from google/pprof

All issues in google/pprof

Similar issues

More Go issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.