CTRACK: C++ Performance Tracking and Bottleneck Discovery - Grischa Hauser - CppCon 2025

https://cppcon.org​ --- CTRACK: C++ Performance Tracking and Bottleneck Discovery - Grischa Hauser - CppCon 2025 --- Finding performance bottlenecks in complex C++ applications has always been a challenge—existing tools often require significant integration effort, add substantial runtime overhead, or lack the granularity needed for precise insights. This session introduces CTRACK, an open-source, header-only C++17 library born from our frustration with these limitations, which has since gained significant traction in the C++ community, even contributing to performance improvements in major projects like ClickHouse. CTRACK emerged from our experience managing large legacy codebases where traditional profilers failed us: we needed something with minimal integration overhead, near-zero runtime cost, and the ability to work seamlessly in both development and production environments. I'll share our journey developing CTRACK, demonstrating how its unique approach of simply adding a one-line macro to functions you want to track provides deep performance insights—especially in multi-threaded environments where timing relationships are critical to understand. The presentation will cover both practical usage patterns and implementation techniques that make CTRACK's remarkable recording speed possible (75+ million events/second). You'll learn how to interpret CTRACK's statistical metrics, customize its output for your needs, and how it fills the gap between manual std::chrono timing and heavyweight profilers. By exploring alternatives we considered and explaining the design decisions we made, this talk will equip C++ developers with knowledge applicable beyond just using CTRACK itself. --- Slides: https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2025/blob/main/Presentations/CTRACK.pdf Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): https://tinyurl.com/safxfctf --- Grischa Hauser Grischa Hauser from Karlsruhe is the founder and managing director of COMPAILE Solutions GmbH, established in 2019 following his career as a freelance programmer. With over 10 years of C++ experience, he specializes in high-performance C++ optimization, including template metaprogramming, parallel algorithms, and multithreading techniques for maximizing computational throughput. His work focuses on performance-critical AI applications and machine vision systems where computational efficiency is paramount. Grischa actively contributes to several open-source C++ libraries and regularly shares implementation insights at technical panels and community events. --- CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. You will enjoy inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere designed to help attendees learn from each other, meet interesting people, and generally have a stimulating experience. Taking place this year in Aurora, Colorado, near the Denver airport, and including multiple diverse tracks, the conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts. Annual CppCon Conference - https://www.cppcon.org https://www.linkedin.com/company/cppcon https://x.com/cppcon https://www.facebook.com/CppConference https://www.reddit.com/r/cppcon/ https://mastodon.social/@CppCon --- Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: http://www.BashFilms.com YouTube Channel Managed by Digital Medium Ltd: https://events.digital-medium.co.uk --- #cpp #cplusplus #cppcon #cppprogramming #cplusplusprogramming #softwaredevelopment #softwareengineering #coding #code #computerscience #technology #technews #programming #programmer