Goref is a Go heap object reference analysis tool based on delve.

It can display the space and object count distribution of Go memory references, which is helpful for efficiently locating memory leak issues or viewing persistent heap objects to optimize GC overhead.

$ go install github.com/cloudwego/goref/cmd/grf@latest

Attach to a running process with its PID, and then use go pprof tool to open the output file.

$ grf attach ${PID}
successfully output to `grf.out`
$ go tool pprof -http=:5079 ./grf.out

The opened HTML page displays the reference distribution of the heap memory. You can choose to view the "inuse space" or "inuse objects".

DWARF parsing of closure type was not supported before Go 1.23, so sub objects of wpool.task cannot be displayed.

View flame graph of inuse objects:

It also supports analyzing core files, e.g.

$ grf core ${execfile} ${corefile}
successfully output to `grf.out`

• Executable file: go1.17 ~ go1.23.
• Compile goref tool: >= go1.21.

How it Works | 实现原理

Thanks to Delve for providing powerful golang debugger.