Orbit: C/C++ Performance Profiler (opens in new tab)

Using some scripts/parsers to take DTrace/perf/Instruments/ETW data and transfer it to perfetto was one of the most exciting moments of my performance engineering career. It’s such a powerful thing compared to every single other workflow I’ve ever used.

It just shows contention in a way that so hard to see otherwise.

If this tool packages some of that in an easier to use package it’s going to be a great tool for some.

Looks like it may have been stadia related.

at least looks like they dropping support for windows

"Orbit's focus has shifted to the Linux version. Windows local profiling is currently only supported partially and major features, such as dynamic instrumentation, are not yet implemented. It is possible however to profile Linux executables from a Windows UI instance. For Windows local profiling, you can still use the released binaries, but please note that they are deprecated and mostly undocumented."

It looks like all the top contributors no longer work on it much, based on github's insights.

What surprised me about Tracy was just how easy it was to include in a C++ project. Just compile and link a single .cpp file (TracyClient.cpp)

Does tracy support automatic function entry/exit (FEE) traces (i.e. all functions are automatically instrumented with a start/end)? The documentation seems to indicate traces are all manual which is pretty inconvenient. There are very few cases where you even need manual instrumentation if you have FEE data from my experience.

What about vtune? I was under the impression that it is pretty much the state of art in profiling

Tracy is amazing. Having just integrated it into a major project, it's leaps and bounds above what we were using previously.

Its foss, vtune is proprietary.

-

Not if you are on macOS, the number of available profilers drops after every release. Same with leak detectors, valgrind doesnt work, sanitizers don't work anymore (even if you compile your own clang).

Tracy and Superluminal.

According to the presentation video, it is a profiling tool used for Stadia Games ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V-EPBPGZPs ) that can adapt to Unity and Unreal Engine. Which seems to make sense as the original developer has experience developing on video games.

The main selling point of the tool is Dynamic instrumentation, which allows you to generate Flame charts without manual code annotation (you pick functions that you are interested into, and the profiler adds a hook to these functions in order to log the entry+exit time).