Comment by sa46

Funny timing—I tried optimizing the Otel Go SDK a few weeks ago (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/issues/67...).

I suspect you could make the tracing SDK 2x faster with some cleverness. The main tricks are:

- Use a faster time.Now(). Go does a fair bit of work to convert to the Go epoch.

- Use atomics instead of a mutex. I sent a PR, but the reviewer caught correctness issues. Atomics are subtle and tricky.

- Directly marshal protos instead of reflection with a hand-rolled library or with https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/easyproto.

The gold standard is how TiDB implemented tracing (https://www.pingcap.com/blog/how-we-trace-a-kv-database-with...). Since Go purposefully (and reasonably) doesn't currently provide a comparable abstraction for thread-local storage, we can't implement similar tricks like special-casing when a trace is modified on a single thread.