Ability to start & stop content tracing

[robatwilliams]

https://electronjs.org/docs/api/content-tracing

Trigger it using a keyboard shortcut. Read options from a file having a well-known name in the same folder. If no file found then create one and populate it with some default options.

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[sindresorhus]

It's not really clear to me how it will be used. If we add ability to start and stop it, how would you see the result? Can you elaborate a bit more about how you imagine working with it and what problems it solves?

[robatwilliams]

Beyond its use in Chromium for detailed tracing, content tracing is of further use in Electron to provide a unified view of application activity across all the processes on a single timeline.

The trace viewer (chrome://tracing) is not included in Electron, so the trace data is saved to a file by the contentTracing.stopRecording(resultFilePath) method. It can then be opened in the trace viewer of any Chromium browser.

That all works today, but it requires me to modify and rebuild my application code to start/stop the tracing at the right moment. I would prefer to be able to start and stop arbitrarily by user interaction, to provide convenience similar to that offered by the devtools Performance tab.

How I imagine it working:

1. Create a file of the name contentTracingOptions.json in the launch directory. These will be passed to contentTracing.startRecording(options). This step is optional; if the file is not found, default options would be passed.
2. Start the tracing with Ctrl Shift T or similar
3. Stop tracing using the same shortcut
4. electron-debug passes the launch directory to stopTracing(resultFilePath), causing Electron to write the trace file in that location

[sindresorhus]

Thanks for elaborating. Yes, this would be a good addition here. I think it should be opt-in through an option though.

Would it maybe also be useful if electron-debug also opened the trace file in Chrome after step 4?

[robatwilliams]

Yes probably.

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