How to Analyze Memory (Heap) Profiles in Go

Generate a heap profile with go tool pprof to identify memory allocations and leaks in your Go application. Run your program with the -memprofilerate flag to control sampling density, then analyze the output using the pprof tool.

# Enable heap profiling and run your program
export GODEBUG=gctrace=1
GOMEMLIMIT=100MiB go run -memprofilerate=1 main.go

# Analyze the generated heap profile
# (Replace 'heap.prof' with your actual profile file path)
go tool pprof -http=:8080 heap.prof

The browser will open an interactive graph showing allocation hotspots. Click nodes to see specific functions and line numbers responsible for memory usage.

Heap profiling is like taking an X-ray of your program's memory usage to find where it is hoarding data. It helps you spot code that allocates too much memory or forgets to release it, which slows down your app. Think of it as a detective tool that points directly to the lines of code causing the memory bloat.