What action should you take if your application runs slower on Compute Engine compared to local testing?

The best approach when your application is experiencing slower performance on Compute Engine compared to local testing is to utilize Cloud Profiler to analyze function execution times. Cloud Profiler is a tool specifically designed to help you understand the performance characteristics of your application by capturing detailed latency and resource usage data as your application runs in the cloud.

By analyzing this data, you can identify bottlenecks or inefficient code paths that may be contributing to slower performance on the cloud infrastructure. It helps you visualize how your application is consuming resources and where optimizations can be made. This type of analysis is crucial for diagnosing performance issues because it takes into account the different environment and load characteristics of Compute Engine.

Using Cloud Profiler allows you to effectively profile the application's functions in real-time, providing insights that can lead to targeted optimizations. This makes it a more practical solution than simply filing a support ticket or adding logging commands, which may not provide the necessary level of detail or actionable insights to resolve the performance concerns. Additionally, while Cloud Debugger can be helpful for debugging, it is less focused on performance profiling than Cloud Profiler.