Frederic Branczyk
@brancz.com
Founder polarsignals.com 🧊 ❄️ Building parca.dev, Prometheus maintainer. Distributed systems, databases, and performance engineering. Actually born in Berlin. (he/him)
We just made it even more convenient to use Polar Signals with your favorite AI!
🤖 Using the Polar Signals MCP just got even easier. Check out how to use it with your favorite AI agent. 🧊
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Introducing Oauth for AI Agents
Use your favorite AI agent securely with Polar Signals Profiling
www.polarsignals.com
February 12, 2026 at 3:05 PM
We just made it even more convenient to use Polar Signals with your favorite AI!
Another @github.com outage? Actions not starting/reported.
February 11, 2026 at 9:33 AM
Another @github.com outage? Actions not starting/reported.
#FOSDEM was a ton of fun this year! Check out our recap if you missed any of our talks!
(also FOSDEM is always a better time if you don't catch fosdem-flu which thankfully I didn't this year!)
(also FOSDEM is always a better time if you don't catch fosdem-flu which thankfully I didn't this year!)
ICYMI We have a recap of what we talked about at #FOSDEM! 🧇 🧊
If you're interested in databases, eBPF or Rust this is worth checking out!
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
If you're interested in databases, eBPF or Rust this is worth checking out!
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
ICYMI: Polar Signals at FOSDEM
Recap of the talks we gave at FOSDEM developer conference
www.polarsignals.com
February 10, 2026 at 3:12 PM
#FOSDEM was a ton of fun this year! Check out our recap if you missed any of our talks!
(also FOSDEM is always a better time if you don't catch fosdem-flu which thankfully I didn't this year!)
(also FOSDEM is always a better time if you don't catch fosdem-flu which thankfully I didn't this year!)
Do I know anyone who has successfully set up Google Workspace user sync and SSO with Azure (as in Google Workspace is the primary)? I could use some help (support has not been helpful).
February 10, 2026 at 10:59 AM
Do I know anyone who has successfully set up Google Workspace user sync and SSO with Azure (as in Google Workspace is the primary)? I could use some help (support has not been helpful).
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
Polar Signals at #FOSDEM 2026 day 2!
Both talks in the Rust room.
Profiling Rust applications with Parca
Brennan at 12:30 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
Frederic at 16:00 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
Random seeds and state machines: An approach to DST in Rust
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
Both talks in the Rust room.
Profiling Rust applications with Parca
Brennan at 12:30 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
Frederic at 16:00 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
Random seeds and state machines: An approach to DST in Rust
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
February 1, 2026 at 9:00 AM
Polar Signals at #FOSDEM 2026 day 2!
Both talks in the Rust room.
Profiling Rust applications with Parca
Brennan at 12:30 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
Frederic at 16:00 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
Random seeds and state machines: An approach to DST in Rust
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
Both talks in the Rust room.
Profiling Rust applications with Parca
Brennan at 12:30 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
Frederic at 16:00 @ UB2.252A (Rust)
Random seeds and state machines: An approach to DST in Rust
fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
@thorfour.dev telling #FOSDEM about our new rust-based database (with lots of open source inside!)
January 31, 2026 at 4:46 PM
@thorfour.dev telling #FOSDEM about our new rust-based database (with lots of open source inside!)
@gnurizen.bsky.social showing us how we can get a memory profile just when your process is about to be killed by the OOM killer.
January 31, 2026 at 11:35 AM
@gnurizen.bsky.social showing us how we can get a memory profile just when your process is about to be killed by the OOM killer.
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
Symbolization issues don’t have to be mysterious.
Polar Signals Cloud now shows exactly what’s happening with your debuginfo, right from the flamegraph frame: www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Polar Signals Cloud now shows exactly what’s happening with your debuginfo, right from the flamegraph frame: www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
How to check your debuginfo status in Polar Signals Cloud
A faster and easier way to troubleshoot debuginfo processing in Polar Signals Cloud.
www.polarsignals.com
January 22, 2026 at 2:19 PM
Symbolization issues don’t have to be mysterious.
Polar Signals Cloud now shows exactly what’s happening with your debuginfo, right from the flamegraph frame: www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Polar Signals Cloud now shows exactly what’s happening with your debuginfo, right from the flamegraph frame: www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
We've been working on something exciting in the Arrow/DataFusion ecosystem, which finally shipped with yesterday's release of DataFusion. You can now use Run-End-Encoded arrays in group by clauses!
github.com/apache/dataf...
github.com/apache/dataf...
Support Aggregating by `RunArray`s · Issue #16011 · apache/datafusion
Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge? It's currently not possible to aggregate by RunArrays. Example code grouping by a `RunArray` use arrow::array::{Array, Int32Array, RunArra...
github.com
January 13, 2026 at 9:45 AM
We've been working on something exciting in the Arrow/DataFusion ecosystem, which finally shipped with yesterday's release of DataFusion. You can now use Run-End-Encoded arrays in group by clauses!
github.com/apache/dataf...
github.com/apache/dataf...
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
My EuroRust talk has been uploaded to YT! I cover how we architected our Rust database at @polarsignals.com as a set of state machines to enable deterministic simulation testing and catch hard-to-reproduce bugs before they hit prod.
A new talk is out! 🙌 @asubiotto.com shows how deterministic simulation testing (DST) uses random seeds and state machines to explore countless execution paths—and reliably replay failures when things go wrong 🦀🎲
👉 youtu.be/V12hHoagv-E
👉 youtu.be/V12hHoagv-E
Random Seeds and State Machines - Alfonso Subiotto | EuroRust 2025
Random Seeds and State Machines: An Approach to Deterministic Simulation Testing - Alfonso Subiotto at EuroRust 2025
Have you spent sleepless nights thinking about that heisenbug in production that…
youtu.be
January 7, 2026 at 11:46 AM
My EuroRust talk has been uploaded to YT! I cover how we architected our Rust database at @polarsignals.com as a set of state machines to enable deterministic simulation testing and catch hard-to-reproduce bugs before they hit prod.
What an awesome year at Polar Signals! Some highlights:
📈 >10x data scale
⚡️ Shipped always-on GPU profiling
🦀 Shipped our new Rust/DataFusion/Vortex DB
Feeling lucky to get to work with such an incredible team & customers like Vercel, Notion, Canonical, Turbopuffer and more!
2026, we're ready!
📈 >10x data scale
⚡️ Shipped always-on GPU profiling
🦀 Shipped our new Rust/DataFusion/Vortex DB
Feeling lucky to get to work with such an incredible team & customers like Vercel, Notion, Canonical, Turbopuffer and more!
2026, we're ready!
December 31, 2025 at 5:11 PM
What an awesome year at Polar Signals! Some highlights:
📈 >10x data scale
⚡️ Shipped always-on GPU profiling
🦀 Shipped our new Rust/DataFusion/Vortex DB
Feeling lucky to get to work with such an incredible team & customers like Vercel, Notion, Canonical, Turbopuffer and more!
2026, we're ready!
📈 >10x data scale
⚡️ Shipped always-on GPU profiling
🦀 Shipped our new Rust/DataFusion/Vortex DB
Feeling lucky to get to work with such an incredible team & customers like Vercel, Notion, Canonical, Turbopuffer and more!
2026, we're ready!
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
We cut cross-zone traffic for SLO monitoring by 90% using Prometheus subquery optimization.
The trick: pre-aggregate data locally instead of shuffling 55M raw samples to Thanos queriers.
Coming soon to Pyrra! 🚀
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
The trick: pre-aggregate data locally instead of shuffling 55M raw samples to Thanos queriers.
Coming soon to Pyrra! 🚀
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Do more with less. | Polar Signals
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.
www.polarsignals.com
December 30, 2025 at 3:02 PM
We cut cross-zone traffic for SLO monitoring by 90% using Prometheus subquery optimization.
The trick: pre-aggregate data locally instead of shuffling 55M raw samples to Thanos queriers.
Coming soon to Pyrra! 🚀
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
The trick: pre-aggregate data locally instead of shuffling 55M raw samples to Thanos queriers.
Coming soon to Pyrra! 🚀
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Just as I was thinking Unifi was getting ahead of Mikrotik, they release this absolute beast of a switch. Modern computing hardware is pretty awesome.
mikrotik.com/product/crs8...
mikrotik.com/product/crs8...
CRS812 DDQ | MikroTik
This switch is your next leap forward – a powerful, efficient, and cost-effective way to bring 50G, 200G, and 400G into your rack. Quad-core 2 GHz ARM CPU, dual-redundant power supplies and 4x…
mikrotik.com
December 27, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Just as I was thinking Unifi was getting ahead of Mikrotik, they release this absolute beast of a switch. Modern computing hardware is pretty awesome.
mikrotik.com/product/crs8...
mikrotik.com/product/crs8...
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
A simple 50-line code change saves us 30% of CPU across our whole infrastructure. This is the magic of system-wide profiling with @polarsignals.com. Easy to spot, easy to fix.
performance[vortex-array]: don't call is_valid to count bytes in varbinview by asubiotto · Pull Request #5814 · vortex-data/vortex
I noticed that the better blocks compressor uses count_referenced_bytes which calls is_valid on each view and results in an expensive scalar_at call. This was 30% of our system-wide CPU usage over ...
github.com
December 23, 2025 at 10:48 AM
A simple 50-line code change saves us 30% of CPU across our whole infrastructure. This is the magic of system-wide profiling with @polarsignals.com. Easy to spot, easy to fix.
It's super easy to get started with profiling your NVIDIA CUDA workload, you don't even need to modify it!
🚀 We recently announced our NVIDIA CUDA always-on profiler. Check out this blog on how to try it out super quickly with your CUDA workload today!🧊
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Profiling NVIDIA CUDA in Kubernetes
The easiest way to get started Profiling CUDA in Kubernetes
www.polarsignals.com
December 18, 2025 at 4:03 PM
It's super easy to get started with profiling your NVIDIA CUDA workload, you don't even need to modify it!
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
Happy to share that I've been nominated to the Vortex Technical Steering Committee! It's been fun and productive switching to Vortex from Parquet as our storage format @polarsignals.com and I'm excited to continue contributing to the Vortex project.
vortex.dev/blog/novembe...
vortex.dev/blog/novembe...
November Bulletin | Vortex Blog
Overview of all work happening in Vortex
vortex.dev
December 15, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Happy to share that I've been nominated to the Vortex Technical Steering Committee! It's been fun and productive switching to Vortex from Parquet as our storage format @polarsignals.com and I'm excited to continue contributing to the Vortex project.
vortex.dev/blog/novembe...
vortex.dev/blog/novembe...
We're big believers of USDTs at Polar Signals, and here is both a deep dive and a bit of detail on how we used them to build the NVIDIA CUDA Profiler we announced a few weeks ago!
Are USDTs the key to unlock the future of low level tracing? Maybe! Read all about how we implemented them and how we plan on using them to breath new life into observability! www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
USDT Probes: A Deep Dive
How we added USDT Probe support to Parca Agent
www.polarsignals.com
December 10, 2025 at 9:04 PM
We're big believers of USDTs at Polar Signals, and here is both a deep dive and a bit of detail on how we used them to build the NVIDIA CUDA Profiler we announced a few weeks ago!
Next.js 16 + turbopack took our frontend builds from 5-7m down to just over 2m. This means faster speed of iteration in development and faster CI.
Performance is UX. Performance is DX. Performance is a feature.
Performance is UX. Performance is DX. Performance is a feature.
December 10, 2025 at 8:07 AM
Next.js 16 + turbopack took our frontend builds from 5-7m down to just over 2m. This means faster speed of iteration in development and faster CI.
Performance is UX. Performance is DX. Performance is a feature.
Performance is UX. Performance is DX. Performance is a feature.
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
🧊 New on the Polar Signals Blog — Our Delta Lake Fork
Purpose-built for our continuous profiling product. In our latest post, we walk through how Delta Lake works, and the changes we've made to improve performance for our product.
👉 Read the full post: buff.ly/KwHINtO
Purpose-built for our continuous profiling product. In our latest post, we walk through how Delta Lake works, and the changes we've made to improve performance for our product.
👉 Read the full post: buff.ly/KwHINtO
Great Lakes: A Delta Lake Fork
Our updates to Delta Lake Table Format
www.polarsignals.com
December 4, 2025 at 2:45 PM
🧊 New on the Polar Signals Blog — Our Delta Lake Fork
Purpose-built for our continuous profiling product. In our latest post, we walk through how Delta Lake works, and the changes we've made to improve performance for our product.
👉 Read the full post: buff.ly/KwHINtO
Purpose-built for our continuous profiling product. In our latest post, we walk through how Delta Lake works, and the changes we've made to improve performance for our product.
👉 Read the full post: buff.ly/KwHINtO
another cloudflare outage?
December 5, 2025 at 8:57 AM
another cloudflare outage?
I just realized that the feedback loop we created for our new database is its real superpower. Since *everything*, including the catalog, is on object storage, it allows us to validate/try out things super fast because everything can act independently against object storage.
November 26, 2025 at 2:08 PM
I just realized that the feedback loop we created for our new database is its real superpower. Since *everything*, including the catalog, is on object storage, it allows us to validate/try out things super fast because everything can act independently against object storage.
Just the move from parquet to vortex gave us a massive perf boost. But more importantly, it opens up the path for way more. So much low hanging fruit now!
We completed a major project to switch our storage file format from Parquet to Vortex 🌪️ resulting in 70% average query performance improvement across the board 🚀
Learn more about how rethinking interface-imposed limitations unlocked these gains in our latest blog post 👇
Learn more about how rethinking interface-imposed limitations unlocked these gains in our latest blog post 👇
November 25, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Just the move from parquet to vortex gave us a massive perf boost. But more importantly, it opens up the path for way more. So much low hanging fruit now!
One of our most popular features, now available with nodejs! Also a sneaky customer reference 👀
Ever wanted to filter flame graphs by distributed trace ID? Or by anything else? In Node.js, now you can! www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Happy Profiling! 🚀🐻❄️
Happy Profiling! 🚀🐻❄️
Custom Labels for Node.js
Correlate Application-Specific Data With Profiles
www.polarsignals.com
November 19, 2025 at 5:58 PM
One of our most popular features, now available with nodejs! Also a sneaky customer reference 👀