Jan 31, 2025 15:00:00

Yandex releases open source tool 'Perforator' that can reduce server CPU costs by up to 20%

Yandex, the Russian search giant, has announced the release of Perforator , a tool that identifies and evaluates inefficiencies in large-scale code. It has been released as open source, and the code has also been made public.

Yandex — Company news — Yandex develops and open-sources Perforator, an open-source tool that can save businesses billions of dollars a year on server infrastructure

https://yandex.com/company/press_center/press_releases/2025/30-01-2025

Perforator is a tool for continuous real-time monitoring and analysis of servers and applications, identifying the most resource-intensive sections of code and obtaining detailed statistics for optimization. Perforator has been used within Yandex for over a year now.

Perforator supports programming languages such as C, C++, Go, Rust, Python, and Java, and can perform detailed analysis of the time taken for each process in programs written in these languages and visualize them in the form of

a flame graph . Thanks to the visualization, you can see at a glance which processes are taking time, and you can efficiently work on improving the performance of your programs.

Yandex said, 'It is possible to reduce infrastructure costs by up to 20%,' and appealed to the benefits of using Perforator, saying, 'Depending on the size of the company, it could lead to savings of hundreds of millions to billions of yen per year.' In addition, by equipping it with profile-guided optimization (PGO), programs written in C++ are automatically optimized by up to 10%. In addition, it also has features for large companies such as A/B testing.

Perforator works with eBPF, a mechanism that allows small programs to run safely within the Linux kernel with minimal system slowdown.

What is 'eBPF', a technology that prevents crashes even if an inappropriate update is made to the kernel area? - GIGAZINE

Perforator is distributed under the open source MIT license on GitHub and is available for free to anyone. Yandex senior developer Sergey Skvortsov said, 'We can promote technological innovation around the world and work with the community on development decisions.' Detailed documentation is also available.

Yandex said it plans to add features such as further integration with Python and Java and more precise analysis of events.