The performance hit (~2%) is observable at runtime, assuming you're doing things which are CPU bound. For cpython programs the especially large hit (~10%) is w

The performance hit (~2%) is observable at runtime, assuming you're doing things which are CPU bound. For cpython programs the especially large hit (~10%) is well understood though not fixed: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2817#comment-826636 https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2817#comment-826636 The flip side to this is that when you have good profiling it changes how you write and debug software. You can actually look at the whole system (eg with Flamegraphs https://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html https://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html) and find out what's taking all the time, and hopefully direct your fixes to the right place. This potentially gives you great performance benefits. Apparently Meta recompile all software with frame pointers and use perf to do this kind of analysis.