Top all-time · #1859
Polar Signals
Company blog · polarsignals.com/blogsystemsprogramming
Polar Signals is the company blog at polarsignals.com, writing about systems and programming. Since 2021, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 94 times, most often “Dwarf-Based Stack Walking Using eBPF”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Polar Signals posts on continuous profiling, eBPF stack unwinding, frame pointers versus DWARF, FrostDB, and GPU profiling. Threads also link their posts when discussing Python runtime internals.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Polar Signals Cloud is an always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling for CPU, GPU, and Memory that helps improve performance, understand incidents, and lower infrastructure costs.
Most-linked posts?
- Dwarf-Based Stack Walking Using eBPF4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-11-29
- Deterministic Simulation Testing in Rust: A Theater of State Machines4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-07-08
- Profiling Python and Ruby Using eBPF3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-11
- (Mostly) Deterministic Simulation Testing in Go3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-28
- A Walk with LuaJIT3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-11-13
- Dwarf-Based Stack Walking Using eBPF2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-10-11
- Best Laid Plans2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-10
- Off-CPU Profiling2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-30
- Fantastic Symbols and Where to Find Them – Part 12 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-14
- Introducing Parca - Open Source Continuous Profiling2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-08
What Hacker News says?
Already been done: 1) native unwinding: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-bas... 2) python: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2023/10/04/profiling... Both available as part of the Parca open source project. https://www.parca.dev/ (Disclaimer I work on Parca and am the founder of Polar Signals)
Comment linking /blog/posts/2023/10/04/profiling-python-and-ruby-with-ebpf
on “Strobelight: A profiling service built on open source technology”Submitted A Walk with LuaJIT as a story · 152 points
HN discussionWe’re working hard to bring a lot of Strobelight to everyone through Parca[0] as OSS and Polar Signals[1] as the commercial version. Some parts already exists much to come this year! :) [0] https://www.parca.dev/ [1] https://www.polarsignals.com/ (Disclaimer: founder of polar signals)
Comment linking /
on “Strobelight: A profiling service built on open source technology”Submitted Introducing ArcticDB: A Database for Observability as a story · 126 points
HN discussionCorrect. They renamed FrostDB, here is the announcement - https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/06/16/arcticdb-...
Comment linking /blog/posts/2022/06/16/arcticdb-is-now-frostdb
on “ArcticDB: Why a Hedge Fund Built Its Own Database”Submitted How devtools map minified JS code back to your TypeScript source code as a story · 107 points
HN discussionJust about anyone who works on a profiler for native binaries has to solve this eventually. We had to as well for our eBPF-based profiler: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-bas...
Comment linking /blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-based-stack-walking-using-ebpf
on “Linux/ELF .eh_frame from the bottom up”Submitted Continuous Nvidia CUDA Profiling in Production as a story · 98 points
HN discussionThis profiler is focused on kernel execution but we do scrape high level metrics ( https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2025/06/04/latest-in... which is based on https://github.com/polarsignals/gpu-metrics-agent ). What performance counters in particular were you interested in?
Comment linking /blog/posts/2025/06/04/latest-in-continuous-profiling-for-gpus
on “Continuous Nvidia CUDA Profiling in Production”Submitted Das Problem mit German Strings as a story · 79 points
HN discussionHey! Founder of Polar Signals here! We are super excited to be announcing Parca[1] an open source continuous profiling storage and query engine as well as an eBPF based profiler. Oh, and also we got funded! Polar Signals was founded almost to the day a year ago, and we launched a private beta for our product earlier this year[2]. We are long time Prometheus, Kubernetes, Thanos, and Cortex maintainers, which are all…
Comment linking /blog/posts/2021/02/09/announcing-polar-signals-continuous-profiler/
on “Introducing Parca - Open Source Continuous Profiling”Submitted Rust: Doubling Throughput with Continuous Profiling and Optimization as a story · 59 points
HN discussionI’m incredibly confused why profiling wasn’t even mentioned in this post. I would highly recommend anyone troubleshooting something like this to do continuous profiling and the root cause of this type of problem becomes painfully obvious within seconds. (Disclaimer I founded a company in this space, and we recently open sources a library for rust to do this: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2023/12/20/rust-me…
Comment linking /blog/posts/2023/12/20/rust-memory-profiling
on “Lessons from debugging a tricky direct memory leak”Submitted Introducing Parca - Open Source Continuous Profiling as a story · 50 points
HN discussionPretty neat! Tried profiling it since it aims for high performance use cases. Love how far we can get with standards in software engineering that we can just take this new language/runtime and just profile it! Wrote a quick blog post on it here: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2023/09/07/profiling...
Comment linking /blog/posts/2023/09/07/profiling-mojo/
on “Mojo: It’s Finally Here”Submitted Show HN: Polar Signals Continuous Profiler – Systematic Performance Profiling as a story · 44 points
HN discussionHey! Thanks for posting! One of the creators here. Happy to answer any questions! Along with the open source project we also announced our seed funding today: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2021/10/08/introduci...
Comment linking /blog/posts/2021/10/08/introducing-parca-we-got-funded/
on “Parca: Open-source Infrastructure-wide continuous profiling”Submitted Deterministic Simulation Testing in Rust: A Theater of State Machines as a story · 39 points
HN discussionThanks for the shout out! The team has done a phenomenal job. If you enjoyed that post, I think you’ll also like the one we wrote about native unwinding without frame pointers: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-bas...
Comment linking /blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-based-stack-walking-using-ebpf
on “Polar Signals Cloud Is Generally Available”Submitted OOMProf: Profiling on the Brink as a story · 27 points
HN discussionI rarely come out and post on HN, but I couldn't resist. First off, congratulations on the launch! I am doing some work around Python tracing using eBPF tools and spending a lot time reading about CPython interpreter and runtime implementation. I came across this Polar Signals blog post[0] last week. Fantastic, fantastic work! I learned a ton about Python internals in just a few minutes that I had completely missed…
Comment linking /blog/posts/2023/10/04/profiling-python-and-ruby-with-ebpf
on “Polar Signals Cloud Is Generally Available”Submitted A Walk with LuaJIT as a story · 20 points
HN discussion> In addition to that we built a custom columnar database I did some digging in your blog history and it seems that is referencing https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/07/22/frostdb-i... and digging into the "but why?" section < https://github.com/polarsignals/frostdb#why-you-should-use-f... > seems to imply you favored the embedded feature over having something standalone, but I would enjoy hearing (or read…
Comment linking /blog/posts/2022/07/22/frostdb-in-prometheus
on “Polar Signals Cloud Is Generally Available”Submitted Dwarf-Based Stack Walking Using eBPF as a story · 19 points
HN discussionIt's pretty hard to tell from the website what this product does, and the submitted title ("Polar Signals Cloud Is Generally Available") doesn't explain anything, so I replaced it with a phrase from https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2023/10/10/polarsign... that seems to say something.
Comment linking /blog/posts/2023/10/10/polarsignals-cloud-ga
on “Polar Signals Cloud Is Generally Available”Submitted Polar Signals Cloud Is Generally Available as a story · 12 points
HN discussionFor the always-on open-source profiler we happen to work on at work we had to do similar things and it was even more involved since we base the whole thing on eBPF to lower the overhead and therefore needed to get the verifier to accept it. [1] We really wish frame pointers were always present, but here we are. [1] https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/11/29/profiling...
Comment linking /blog/posts/2022/11/29/profiling-without-frame-pointers/
on “Unwinding the Stack the Hard Way”Submitted Fantastic Symbols and Where to Find Them – Part 1 as a story · 12 points
HN discussionWe've "fixed"[1] all the tooling that we work on at Polar Signals, and even then I think this is the right thing to do. It enables so much more debuggability aside from profiling. [1] https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-bas...
Comment linking /blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-based-stack-walking-using-ebpf
on “Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default”Submitted Deterministic Simulation Testing in Rust: A Theater of State Machines as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
