Show HN: Whytime: time(1) that tells you where the wall-clock time went

Category: observability

Tags: ebpf, profiling, performance, tracing, linux

Score: 8.3/10 (Innovation: 8, Technical: 9, Documentation: 9, Utility: 7)

whytime is an eBPF-based tool that traces a command's entire process tree and partitions wall-clock time along the critical path, explaining exactly where time went (on-CPU, off-CPU waits, network, fsync, etc.). It goes beyond traditional profiling by following wait chains across processes to attribute delays to the actual bottleneck, making it uniquely useful for performance debugging.

Target audience: backend devs, devops, performance engineers, systems programmers

Repository: https://github.com/Arinerron/whytime · Rust · MIT

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