Benchmarking and profiling

Go has two excellent ways to analyze the performance of your code. We have benchmark tests and the fantastic pprof.

Benchmarks

Benchmarking is a way of measuring the performance of your code by executing it multiple times with a fixed workload. We took a look at this briefly in Chapter 1, Introduction to Microservices, where we ascertained that the json.Marshal method was slower than the json.Encode method. While this is a useful feature, I find it tough to work out what I should benchmark. If I am writing an algorithm, then this is relatively straightforward. However, when writing a microservice that is predominately interacting with a database, it is far more challenging.

To demonstrate how easy...