Purpose of pyroscope-io in litellm

[hasan4791]

Trying to run litellm on ppc64le and we have an issue with one of the dependency "failed to load source for dependency ffikit" from the pyroscope-io. Also its mentioned in the optional dependencies list. If we skip this package, what feature we miss from the litellm?

[harshagarwalnyu]

Skipping the profiling is totally safe, LiteLLM's core (routing, fallbacks, caching, spend tracking, all the logging integrations) never touches pyroscope. It's gated behind an env flag and only runs if you opt in.

The flag that controls it is LITELLM_ENABLE_PYROSCOPE. You can see the wiring in litellm/proxy/proxy_server.py in _init_pyroscope: it calls get_secret_bool("LITELLM_ENABLE_PYROSCOPE") and returns early if that isn't set, so with the flag unset the profiling path never runs even if the package is missing.

Where ppc64le bites you: pyroscope-io is listed in the proxy extra in pyproject.toml:

pyroscope-io>=0.8.16,<1.0; sys_platform != 'win32'

so pip install 'litellm[proxy]' does try to pull it on Linux, and pyroscope-io ships a native (Rust) extension with no ppc64le wheel, so pip falls back to building from source and that's what blows up. It isn't pure Python.

Cleanest fix on ppc64le is to install core LiteLLM without the proxy extra:

pip install litellm

If you need the other proxy deps, install them explicitly and just leave pyroscope-io out (it's the only one with the missing-wheel problem), and don't set LITELLM_ENABLE_PYROSCOPE. Everything except the flamegraph profiling behaves exactly the same.

[hasan4791]

Thank you @harshagarwalnyu Yes, we have skipped this package and i see its disabled by default.