Deprecation: Request Profiling

Deprecation Summary

We plan to deprecate the Request Profiling feature and remove it in %15.0.

We're working on consolidating our profiling tools, and making them more easily accessible. We have reviewed Request Profiling (#350152 (closed)) and we have found that it is not used by GitLab Team members. We have also found that it depends on some third party gems that are not actively maintained anymore, have not been updated for the latest version of Ruby or crash frequently when profiling heavy page loads (!78912 (comment 826176261))

This is a tool mainly intended for development and debugging purposes, but it is also available for administrators of self managed instances, so we want to announce the deprecation prior to the removal in %15.0 and warn anyone that may be actively using it.

As an additional note: We plan to support and provide the existing functionality to self managed users through a new feature that will be added in the performance bar (!78670 (merged)), but there are security concerns for enabling this feature in production environments (#350152 (comment 826859583)). We are going to enable this new feature for development only in %14.8, thoroughly test it and make sure that it can be released for production use as well. For that reason, we are decoupling the deprecation announcement from the release of that new feature (as we want to remove Request Profiling either way as explained above) and we will follow-up with an announcement for the new feature once and if it can be released to end users as well.

Breaking Change

This is a breaking change for administrators using Request Profiling.

It will not be available starting in %15.0, but we plan to provide the existing functionality through the performance bar. More details can be found in the summary section.

Affected Topology

SaaS: not affected; this is a feature only available to admins (administrators).
Self-managed: Affected (administrators)

Affected Tier

Free
Premium
Ultimate

Checklist

@mention your stage's stable counterparts on this issue. For example, Customer Support, Customer Success (Technical Account Manager), Product Marketing Manager.
@mention your GPM so that they are aware of planned deprecations. The goal is to have reviews happen at least two releases before the final removal of the feature or introduction of a breaking change.

Deprecation Milestone

%14.8

Planned Removal Milestone

%15.0