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Profilers measure the performance of a program at runtime by adding instrumentation to collect information about the frequency and duration of function calls. They are crucial tools for understanding the real-world performance characteristics of code and are often the first step in optimizing a program. In this post, we’ll walk through how we built Sentry’s iOS profiler, which is capable of collecting high quality profiling data from real user devices in production with minimal overhead.

Relay is an open source project by Sentry that receives data from Sentry SDKs for pre-processing. We wanted to make Relay behave like an AWS Lambda Extension moving our service closer to your code, and decreasing the latency of your Lambda functions. In this blog post, I’ll share how we used the actor model to set up Relay to behave like a Lambda Extension.

In the modern web, the JavaScript you write is often down-compiled using a compiler like Babel to make sure your JavaScript is compatible with older browsers or environments. In addition, if you are using TypeScript (like the Sentry SDK’s do) or something similar, you’ll have to transpile your TypeScript to JavaScript. Understanding how your code is being transpiled and downcompiled is important, because your bundle size is affected by your final generated JavaScript. This post is all about the technical prep work needed to ship a 0 bug reported major issue.

Developers started to notice just how big our JavaScript package was and yeah, we knew. We weren’t ignoring the issues; after all, we don’t want the Sentry package to be the cause of a slowdown. But to reduce our JavaScript SDK package size effectively we had to account for shipping new capabilities, like being able to manage the health of a release and performance monitoring, while maintaining a manageable bundle size. After all, new features == bigger package - usually.

Event ingestion is one of the most mission-critical components at Sentry, so it’s only natural that we constantly strive to improve its scalability and efficiency. In this blog post, we want to share our journey of designing and building a distributed ingestion infrastructure—Sentry Points of Presence— that handles billions of events per day and helps thousands of organizations see what actually matters and solve critical issues quickly.

SDKs naturally increase in size over time. After all, it does take more bytes to implement more features. This is not a big deal for most languages—the relative size of each new feature is small, and load times and storage aren’t big concerns for code running on a server. Larger JS bundles mean longer load times, which in turn increase user misery, which then can cause the user to leave pages entirely.

Most plugin based models load all assemblies into a single shared context. This is a common approach because it has better memory usage and startup performance. The history and rules of assembly loading in .NET is convoluted; its current status makes it difficult (and sometimes impossible) to load multiple different versions of the same assembly into a shared context. Instead of trying to struggle with existing options we decided to build a new tool: Alias.

In today’s modern web stack it’s anything but. Full stack developers are expected to write JavaScript executing in the browser, interop with multiple database technologies, and deploy server side code on different server architectures (e.g. serverless). Without the right tools, understanding how a user interaction in the browser cascades into a 500 server error deep in your server stack is nigh-impossible. Enter: distributed tracing.

Recently, Sentry converted 100% of its frontend React codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript. This year-long effort spanned over a dozen members of the engineering team, 1,100 files, and 95,000 lines of code. In this blog post, we share our process, techniques, challenges, and ultimately, what we learned along this journey.

At its core, Sentry is a tool that alerts you to defects in your production software. But it does more than blast stack traces into your inbox: Sentry provides powerful workflows to help your team determine root cause, triage issues to your team, and keep tabs on ongoing concerns with comments and notifications. At the end of 2019, the Growth team made it our mission to make it easier for our users to invite their teammates to join them on Sentry. Our theory: improving the user experience of inviting users, as well as democratizing the process to include all team members would lead to a significant increase in team-wide adoption. (Narrator: it did.)