pprofutils provides command line utilities for converting pprof files to Brendan Gregg's folded text format and vice versa.

pprofutils requires Go 1.16 and can be installed like this:

go install github.com/felixge/pprofutils/cmd/...@latest

Convert a pprof file to text:

pprof2text < ./test-fixtures/pprof.samples.cpu.001.pb.gz > example.txt

Convert a text file to pprof:

text2pprof < example.txt > example.pprof

Warning: Converting from pprof to text is lossy. Only the first sample type will be converted, file names, lines, labels, and more will be dropped. Patches to make things less lossy would be welcome, but please open an issue first to discuss.

Create a delta profile that contains the difference heap-b.pprof - heap-a.pprof:

pprofdelta -o delta.pprof heap-a.pprof heap-b.pprof

My primary use case for this tool is to quickly generate fake pprof profiles for creating educational content.

This can be done by simply creating a file called profile.txt with the following content:

main;foo 5
main;foo;bar 3
main;foobar 4

Then convert it to a pprof profile:

text2pprof < profile.txt > profile.pprof

And finally view it using pprof:

go tool pprof -http=:6060 profile.pprof

The resulting graphs should look like this:

The text2pprof command supports a custom extension to the folded text format that allows users to specify multiple sample types.

This is done via a header that contains space separated type/unit sample types. The stack traces on the following lines must then contain one value for each sample type after the stack trace:

samples/count duration/nanoseconds
main;foo 5 50000000
main;foo;bar 3 30000000
main;foobar 4 40000000

The pprof2text command also supports outputting this format by passing the -m flag.

pprofutils is licensed under the MIT License.