[ungzd]

> Unfortunately (to me) the focus on ease-of-use has meant that OpenTelemetry concepts are structured in such a way to preclude even the possibility of a very efficient implementation

Looks like Opentelemetry (at least its precedessor, OpenCensus) is originated from Google. From OpenCensus website (https://opencensus.io/):

> OpenCensus and OpenTracing have merged to form OpenTelemetry

> OpenCensus originates from Google, where a set of libraries called Census are used to automatically capture traces and metrics from services.

Original internal Google tracing system was probably designed for scale. And opentelemetry's design is probably based on that internal system.

So, maybe poor performance is just an implementations issue.

[jeffbee]

OpenCensus bears no resemblance whatsoever to Google Census, except for the name. Census at Google is wired tight as hell. Any time it showed up on the first page of fleet-wide profiles it would get hammered back down. At the same time it also has more capabilities than its open source successors. Unfortunately, nothing has ever been published about it.