A new cohort of Rust profiling tools—Hotpath, Tokio DTrace, dial9—has emerged in the last 12 months, each taking a different approach to instrumenting async and sync code in production. This talk compares their tradeoffs (privilege requirements, overhead, deployment constraints) and shows how AI-assisted analysis, via Hotpath’s MCP server and dial9’s built-in skills, can find bottlenecks faster than a flamegraph.
Hayden is an engineering manager at HERE Technologies, focused on serving real-time traffic information to end users in great detail at low latency (increasingly using Rust). He’s a passionate Rust developer and is a core member of the tokio-rs maintainer team and the defacto maintainer of the Tracing and Tokio Console crates. GitHub: https://github.com/hds Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@hds BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/hds.cafe
