Histograms show aggregate latency but not causality; traces show causality but are expensive at scale. Tracegrams fill the gap: a lightweight primitive where requests carry latency state through transition histograms at each checkpoint, showing where p99 is born and amplified with minimal overhead. This talk covers a Rust prototype, synthetic stress tests against known ground truth, and nanosecond-per-checkpoint overhead numbers.
Ivan Goncharov is a performance engineer with 18 years of experience in systems debugging, benchmarking, and observability. He leads PerfLab at Azul Systems, building reproducible JVM benchmarking, regression detection, and large-scale performance analysis infrastructure. Previously, he contributed to PostgreSQL scaling to 1M QPS on a single machine at IBM and led performance testing and infrastructure projects for enterprise payment processing systems.
