runtime/pprof: document use of pprof package

Currently the pprof package gives almost no guidance for how to use it
and, despite the standard boilerplate used to create CPU and memory
profiles, this boilerplate appears nowhere in the pprof documentation.

Update the pprof package documentation to give the standard
boilerplate in a form people can copy, paste, and tweak. This
boilerplate is based on rsc's 2011 blog post on profiling Go programs
at https://blog.golang.org/profiling-go-programs, which is where I
always go when I need to copy-paste the boilerplate.

Change-Id: I74021e494ea4dcc6b56d6fb5e59829ad4bb7b0be
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/25182
Reviewed-by: Rick Hudson <rlh@golang.org>

1 files changed, 62 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/runtime/pprof/pprof.go b/src/runtime/pprof/pprof.go
index b7c41f13de..25f7ed6eb1 100644
--- a/src/runtime/pprof/pprof.go
+++ b/src/runtime/pprof/pprof.go
@@ -4,8 +4,69 @@
 
 // Package pprof writes runtime profiling data in the format expected
 // by the pprof visualization tool.
+//
+// Profiling a Go program
+//
+// The first step to profiling a Go program is to enable profiling.
+// Support for profiling benchmarks built with the standard testing
+// package is built into go test. For example, the following command
+// runs benchmarks in the current directory and writes the CPU and
+// memory profiles to cpu.prof and mem.prof:
+//
+//     go test -cpuprofile cpu.prof -memprofile mem.prof -bench .
+//
+// To add equivalent profiling support to a standalone program, add
+// code like the following to your main function:
+//
+//    var cpuprofile = flag.String("cpuprofile", "", "write cpu profile `file`")
+//    var memprofile = flag.String("memprofile", "", "write memory profile to `file`")
+//
+//    func main() {
+//        flag.Parse()
+//        if *cpuprofile != "" {
+//            f, err := os.Create(*cpuprofile)
+//            if err != nil {
+//                log.Fatal("could not create CPU profile: ", err)
+//            }
+//            if err := pprof.StartCPUProfile(f); err != nil {
+//                log.Fatal("could not start CPU profile: ", err)
+//            }
+//            defer pprof.StopCPUProfile()
+//        }
+//        ...
+//        if *memprofile != "" {
+//            f, err := os.Create(*memprofile)
+//            if err != nil {
+//                log.Fatal("could not create memory profile: ", err)
+//            }
+//            runtime.GC() // get up-to-date statistics
+//            if err := pprof.WriteHeapProfile(f); err != nil {
+//                log.Fatal("could not write memory profile: ", err)
+//            }
+//            f.Close()
+//        }
+//    }
+//
+// There is also a standard HTTP interface to profiling data. Adding
+// the following line will install handlers under the /debug/pprof/
+// URL to download live profiles:
+//
+//    import _ "net/http/pprof"
+//
+// See the net/http/pprof package for more details.
+//
+// Profiles can then be visualized with the pprof tool:
+//
+//    go tool pprof cpu.prof
+//
+// There are many commands available from the pprof command line.
+// Commonly used commands include "top", which prints a summary of the
+// top program hot-spots, and "web", which opens an interactive graph
+// of hot-spots and their call graphs. Use "help" for information on
+// all pprof commands.
+//
 // For more information about pprof, see
-// http://github.com/google/pprof/.
+// https://github.com/google/pprof/blob/master/doc/pprof.md.
 package pprof
 
 import (