Frederic Branczyk
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brancz.com
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
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! 🧑‍💻
November 11, 2025 at 5:55 PM
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
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
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
.@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...
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
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!
October 31, 2025 at 9:30 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...
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
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
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...
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
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
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
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
I had a great time talking about GPU profiling at Ubuntu Summit! Thanks everyone for joining!
October 24, 2025 at 10:58 AM
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
"We're seeing more Rust recently", "Although 95 % of CUDA workflows use Python"

@brancz.com from @polarsignals.com at #UbuntuSummit2510

#UbuntuSummit
October 24, 2025 at 9:12 AM
If you're at #UbuntuSummit Thursday and Friday, come hear me speak about how we created the world's first open-source low-overhead always-on #NVIDIA #CUDA Profiler! discourse.ubuntu.com/t/infrastruc...

#performance #GPU
October 22, 2025 at 2:31 PM
I could not be more excited about this. To our knowledge, the world's first open-source low-overhead always-on GPU profiler!

As always, zero-instrumentation and powered by #eBPF!
October 22, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Quick one-hour weekend experiment, and I'm already visualizing our CI infrastructure at Polar Signals as distributed traces in Jaeger! Already gave me insight that I didn't know before (our Rust tests are the critical path, not release binary build times)!
October 18, 2025 at 12:29 PM
It's been that kind of a day ...
October 13, 2025 at 6:48 PM
I don't know why I have to rediscover this over and over, but reducing CI time is such an incredible productivity booster; every second shaved off is worth the investment!
October 13, 2025 at 6:26 PM
When did we go from "computers are not great at making use of all those cores" to "a lot of software scales linearly with the number of cores you give it".

Not complaining, just feels like yesterday that we said the former statement a lot.
October 12, 2025 at 2:50 PM
I have several services that use as much network bandwidth as is available to them on Kubernetes. But I need to prioritize or at least guarantee some amount of bandwidth to a certain component. What are my options other than separate node pools?
October 11, 2025 at 12:38 PM
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
Took advantage of the lunch break to replay this great talk by Alfonso Subiotto (@asubiotto.com) making the case for a State Machines based approach to Deterministic Simulation Testing, being used at @polarsignals.com, very interesting!

Their inspiration for this: sled.rs/simulation
October 10, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Figure out when the deploy happened 👀
October 9, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Reposted by Frederic Branczyk
So cool and parca.dev getting mentioned out of nowhere. Love to see it!
New tooling for profiling performance-critical services with Swift -- introducing the Swift Profile Recorder. More here: www.swift.org/blog/swift-p...
October 8, 2025 at 7:54 AM
Google Mail moved the mark as unread button in the dropdown, and I hate it.
October 7, 2025 at 3:00 PM