# Continuous Profiling

> Use continuous profiling to understand where production CPU, memory, and other resources are spent over time. Use when optimizing performance, investigating resource usage, or building a culture of efficiency.

- Skill: `itsual/continuous-profiling` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add itsual/continuous-profiling`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/itsual/continuous-profiling/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: itsual (https://skillmd.com/u/itsual)
- Updated: 2026-09-21
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/itsual/continuous-profiling

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# Continuous Profiling

## Overview

Continuous profiling collects performance data from production (or production-like) environments on an ongoing basis, making it possible to see real-world resource consumption patterns.

## When to Use

- Investigating high CPU, memory, or allocation costs
- Optimizing efficiency at scale
- Comparing performance before/after changes in real traffic

## Practices

- Prefer low-overhead continuous profilers suitable for production
- Correlate profiles with deployments, traffic patterns, and incidents
- Focus optimization effort on the hottest, most costly paths
- Combine with tracing and metrics for full context

## Principles

- Production data beats synthetic benchmarks for many optimization questions
- Profile-guided optimization should be driven by evidence, not intuition

## Verification

- Profiles are available for key services with acceptable overhead
- Teams can answer “where is the CPU/memory going?” with data