Document how to profile Ray using pprof. (#1464)

* Document how to profile Ray using pprof.

* Link to profiling.rst via main doc site; fix lint

* Some changes and clarifications.

doc/source/index.rst

@@ -106,4 +106,5 @@ Example Program
 
    troubleshooting.rst
    development.rst
+   profiling.rst
    contact.rst

doc/source/profiling.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+Profiling Ray
+=============
+
+This document details, for Ray developers, how to use ``pprof`` to profile Ray
+binaries.
+
+Installation
+------------
+
+These instructions are for Ubuntu only. Attempts to get ``pprof`` to correctly
+symbolize on Mac OS have failed.
+
+.. code-block:: bash
+
+  sudo apt-get install google-perftools libgoogle-perftools-dev
+
+Changes to compilation and linking
+----------------------------------
+
+Let's say we want to profile the ``plasma_manager``.  Change the link
+instruction in ``src/plasma/CMakeLists.txt`` from
+
+.. code-block:: cmake
+
+  target_link_libraries(plasma_manager common ${PLASMA_STATIC_LIB} ray_static ${ARROW_STATIC_LIB} -lpthread)
+
+to additionally include ``-lprofiler``:
+
+.. code-block:: cmake
+
+  target_link_libraries(plasma_manager common ${PLASMA_STATIC_LIB} ray_static ${ARROW_STATIC_LIB} -lpthread -lprofiler)
+
+Additionally, add ``-g -ggdb`` to ``CMAKE_C_FLAGS`` and ``CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS`` to
+enable the debug symbols.  (Keeping ``-O3`` seems okay.)
+
+Recompile.
+
+Launching the to-profile binary
+-------------------------------
+
+In various places, instead of launching the target binary via
+``plasma_manager <args>``, it must be launched with
+
+.. code-block:: bash
+
+  LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libprofiler.so CPUPROFILE=/tmp/pprof.out plasma_manager <args>
+
+In practice, this means modifying ``python/ray/plasma/plasma.py`` so that the
+manager is launched with a command that passes a ``modified_env`` into
+``Popen``.
+
+.. code-block:: python
+
+  modified_env = os.environ.copy()
+  modified_env["LD_PRELOAD"] = "/usr/lib/libprofiler.so"
+  modified_env["CPUPROFILE"] = "/tmp/pprof.out"
+
+  process = subprocess.Popen(command,
+                             stdout=stdout_file,
+                             stderr=stderr_file,
+                             env=modified_env)
+
+The file ``/tmp/pprof.out`` will be empty until you let the binary run the
+target workload for a while and then ``kill`` it.
+
+Visualizing the CPU profile
+---------------------------
+
+The output of ``pprof`` can be visualized in many ways. Here we output it as a
+zoomable ``.svg`` image displaying the call graph annotated with hot paths.
+
+.. code-block:: bash
+
+  # Use the appropriate path.
+  PLASMA_MANAGER=ray/python/ray/core/src/plasma/plasma_manager
+
+  google-pprof -svg $PLASMA_MANAGER /tmp/pprof.out > /tmp/pprof.svg
+  # Then open the .svg file with Chrome.
+
+  # If you realize the call graph is too large, use -focus=<some function> to zoom
+  # into subtrees.
+  google-pprof -focus=epoll_wait -svg $PLASMA_MANAGER /tmp/pprof.out > /tmp/pprof.svg
+
+Here's a snapshot of an example svg output, taken from the official
+documentation:
+
+.. image:: http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/pprof-test-big.gif
+
+References
+----------
+
+- The `pprof documentation <http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/cpu_profiler.html>`_.
+- A `Go version of pprof <https://github.com/google/pprof>`_.
+- The `gperftools <https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools>`_, including libprofiler, tcmalloc, and other goodies.