[SassyBird]

> So, what, exactly, am I looking for?

This can’t be answered in general. Flamegraphs are measurements of what happened. But just like a ruler doesn’t tell you whether a given human is atypically short or tall for its species, a flamegraph can’t tell you which portion of the program takes too long a time. You need to have prior knowledge about data structures, algorithms, memory bandwidth etc in order to confront your justified expectations with the reality and be surprised with something. And it will all depend on the particular program you profile.