Time to Wow!

Time to Wow! (TtW) measures the time it takes for a customer to experience their first emotional “Wow” moment with your product or service. —Irit Eizips. What the heck is Time to Wow (and Why You Should Start Tracking it Today!)

A Lesson from Open Source: Perforator

I experienced this a few days ago with Perforator, a recently open-sourced project by Yandex¹. Perforator is a cluster-wide continuous profiling tool designed for large data centers, somewhat similar to opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler released by Elastic a year earlier.

I don’t currently have a use case for distributed profiling, but I was curious to experiment with it. I’m always eager to try new things and see how they work. I couldn’t manage to get an end-to-end working setup with the Elastic project without investing a lot of time. Perforator, on the other hand, seemed like magic.

I started with their local usage tutorial Optimizing Native Applications with Perforator:

git clone https://github.com/yandex/perforator.git
cd perforator
# takes ~10 minutes to build on my machine
./ya make perforator/cmd/cli
# install debug symbols for find so we have something to look at
sudo apt install --yes findutils-dbgsym
# Record a profile and serve it on localhost:1234
sudo perforator/cmd/cli/perforator record --serve :1234 -- find /home/nv -regex '.*\.\(cpp\|h\)' > /dev/null

A few seconds later I got an interactive flamegraph in my browser showing where the CPU time was spent in the find command. Down to kernel functions!

All in all, it took approximately 15 minutes to get to the “Wow!” moment, with the majority of the time spent waiting for the build to finish. I was actively involved for around 5 minutes. It is now part of my toolbox, replacing perf flamegraphs, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with it further. There are much more advanced features to explore, but they got me hooked already.

Other examples

ClickHouse

ClickHouse is an open-source, high-performance, distributed SQL OLAP database management system. You can deploy it on thousands of machines but you need only 15 seconds to get to the “Wow” moment:

# start a bash shell and time it
time bash
curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh

#< Successfully downloaded the ClickHouse binary, you can run it as:
#<    ./clickhouse
#< You can also install it:
#< sudo ./clickhouse install
./clickhouse
#< Decompressing the binary....
#< ClickHouse local version 25.3.1.95 (official build).

:) select 'hello world'

#< SELECT 'hello world'
#< Query id: 4b4080d1-2e1c-4d29-8a2e-d4ec96dd0e39
#<
#<    ┌─'hello world'─┐
#< 1. │ hello world   │
#<    └───────────────┘
#<
#< 1 row in set. Elapsed: 0.001 sec.

exit

#< real	0m14.277s

You don’t get to experience all the features in 15 seconds, especially the performance benefits, but you get to see that it works and you can start experimenting with it. You can also see how much love and care the developers put into the project.

This is how you win developers’ hearts.