Profiling Request Latency with Critical Path Analysis

Learn about a novel approach to diagnosing Go request latency problems through critical path analysis in this conference talk from GopherCon 2025. Discover why traditional CPU profiling with pprof falls short when dealing with request latency issues, as Go applications typically experience latency dominated by Off-CPU waits for downstream services, databases, mutex contention, channel bottlenecks, scheduling delays, and backoff sleeps. Explore the limitations of conventional observability tools like metrics, traces, and logs, which require significant time, money, and overhead while still leaving blind spots in performance analysis, particularly for high tail latencies. Understand how a groundbreaking implementation of critical path analysis can convert runtime execution tracing data into actionable profiles, enabling you to root cause even the most challenging latency problems with zero instrumentation and extremely low overhead. Gain practical insights into this innovative profiling technique that promises to revolutionize how developers approach latency debugging in Go applications without the traditional costs and complexity of extensive observability infrastructure.