Frederic Branczyk
@brancz.com
Founder polarsignals.com 🧊 ❄️ Building parca.dev, Prometheus maintainer. Distributed systems, databases, and performance engineering. Actually born in Berlin. (he/him)
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 👀
It's so awesome that we can use our own product every single day at Polar Signals to understand our own software. I want to get into the rhythm and do more of these.
What do you think? How would you have troubleshooted this, and could you have understood what's going on in less than 1min?
What do you think? How would you have troubleshooted this, and could you have understood what's going on in less than 1min?
November 19, 2025 at 2:04 PM
It's so awesome that we can use our own product every single day at Polar Signals to understand our own software. I want to get into the rhythm and do more of these.
What do you think? How would you have troubleshooted this, and could you have understood what's going on in less than 1min?
What do you think? How would you have troubleshooted this, and could you have understood what's going on in less than 1min?
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
Good morning #KubeCon!
We are excited to meet all of you and talk about performance! 🚀
Stop by our booth at 1360 next to the Demo Theatre to learn more about CPU, GPU, and memory profiling in production! 🧑💻
We are excited to meet all of you and talk about performance! 🚀
Stop by our booth at 1360 next to the Demo Theatre to learn more about CPU, GPU, and memory profiling in production! 🧑💻
November 11, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Good morning #KubeCon!
We are excited to meet all of you and talk about performance! 🚀
Stop by our booth at 1360 next to the Demo Theatre to learn more about CPU, GPU, and memory profiling in production! 🧑💻
We are excited to meet all of you and talk about performance! 🚀
Stop by our booth at 1360 next to the Demo Theatre to learn more about CPU, GPU, and memory profiling in production! 🧑💻
Is there some global load-balancing product out there that's less expensive than Google Cloud's load balancer? ($0.008/GiB)
November 7, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Is there some global load-balancing product out there that's less expensive than Google Cloud's load balancer? ($0.008/GiB)
You thought docker is causing a lot of wasted space on your disk? Try working on a moderately sized Rust codebase that produces 10 binaries 🫠
November 6, 2025 at 12:22 PM
You thought docker is causing a lot of wasted space on your disk? Try working on a moderately sized Rust codebase that produces 10 binaries 🫠
Never thought I'd say this, but for the first time in a decade, I'm working on a database that can just be queried with SQL, and it's kind of nice 😅
November 6, 2025 at 11:44 AM
Never thought I'd say this, but for the first time in a decade, I'm working on a database that can just be queried with SQL, and it's kind of nice 😅
.@manojvivek.bsky.social has really outdone himself with the animated parts of this blog post!
Ever wondered how your browser devtools jumps from bundle.min.js:1:27698 → src/index.ts:73:16? 🧊
We unpack the internals of JS Source Maps: Base64 VLQ encoding, mapping deltas, and how your original TS code gets reconstructed from minified bundles.
🔗 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
We unpack the internals of JS Source Maps: Base64 VLQ encoding, mapping deltas, and how your original TS code gets reconstructed from minified bundles.
🔗 www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
The Inner Workings of JavaScript Source Maps
A deep dive into how JavaScript source maps work under the hood, with examples showing how all the pieces fit together.
www.polarsignals.com
November 4, 2025 at 3:11 PM
.@manojvivek.bsky.social has really outdone himself with the animated parts of this blog post!
I was disappointed with the Unifi lineup from Ubiquiti for some time, but the new products are looking pretty awesome! (APs, 10GbE fiber gateway, 10GbE switches with PoE++)
Mikrotik is lagging behind for the first time in some time for me!
Mikrotik is lagging behind for the first time in some time for me!
October 31, 2025 at 9:30 PM
I was disappointed with the Unifi lineup from Ubiquiti for some time, but the new products are looking pretty awesome! (APs, 10GbE fiber gateway, 10GbE switches with PoE++)
Mikrotik is lagging behind for the first time in some time for me!
Mikrotik is lagging behind for the first time in some time for me!
1% across the board and significantly more for some workloads! Mad props to Canonical for doing the non flashy but impactful important work that only few companies on the planet can!
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/introducin...
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/introducin...
Introducing architecture variants: amd64v3 now available in Ubuntu 25.10
Ubuntu prides itself on being among the most compatible Linux distributions. Compatibility is often a conscious trade-off against bleeding-edge performance. In Ubuntu 25.10, we have added support for…
discourse.ubuntu.com
October 31, 2025 at 8:48 PM
1% across the board and significantly more for some workloads! Mad props to Canonical for doing the non flashy but impactful important work that only few companies on the planet can!
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/introducin...
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/introducin...
We made a bit of a dumb thing early on at Polar Signals where we accidentally created a critical GCS bucket as multi-region. But today I learned about Bucket relocation (launched in 2024). Very timely! docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs...
Bucket relocation | Cloud Storage | Google Cloud Documentation
This document describes the Cloud Storage bucket relocation service that relocates buckets serverlessly between geographic locations. Using bucket relocation, you can move an existing bucket from one…
docs.cloud.google.com
October 31, 2025 at 2:52 PM
We made a bit of a dumb thing early on at Polar Signals where we accidentally created a critical GCS bucket as multi-region. But today I learned about Bucket relocation (launched in 2024). Very timely! docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs...
I noticed that cross-zone traffic has once again crept up on us at Polar Signals, so I dusted off kubezonnet, and implemented a few new features/bug fixes as I was troubleshooting.
I present v0.2.0, which we just used to cut 62% of cross-zone traffic. Real money saved.
github.com/polarsignals...
I present v0.2.0, which we just used to cut 62% of cross-zone traffic. Real money saved.
github.com/polarsignals...
Release v0.2.0 · polarsignals/kubezonnet
What's Changed Fix bug about packet sizes being read incorrectly, causing especially small sizes to be inflated. f79dc1b Add port information to flow logs. c136e7c New Contributors @metalmatze m...
github.com
October 31, 2025 at 12:20 PM
I noticed that cross-zone traffic has once again crept up on us at Polar Signals, so I dusted off kubezonnet, and implemented a few new features/bug fixes as I was troubleshooting.
I present v0.2.0, which we just used to cut 62% of cross-zone traffic. Real money saved.
github.com/polarsignals...
I present v0.2.0, which we just used to cut 62% of cross-zone traffic. Real money saved.
github.com/polarsignals...
We're on the HN front page with our post on the NVIDIA GPU profiler we created. Please help us spread the word and comment if you have any questions!
October 29, 2025 at 1:11 PM
We're on the HN front page with our post on the NVIDIA GPU profiler we created. Please help us spread the word and comment if you have any questions!
It's absolutely crazy what computers are capable of when we produce software that works with hardware in mind.
October 29, 2025 at 12:42 PM
It's absolutely crazy what computers are capable of when we produce software that works with hardware in mind.
The NVIDIA RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell with 24GB is looking quite interesting as a workstation GPU as an alternative to a Spark DGX. Obviously not quite apples to apples with different memory speed and sizes but still, 24gb is large enough to do interesting things with.
October 29, 2025 at 7:00 AM
The NVIDIA RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell with 24GB is looking quite interesting as a workstation GPU as an alternative to a Spark DGX. Obviously not quite apples to apples with different memory speed and sizes but still, 24gb is large enough to do interesting things with.