electron/docs/api/content-tracing.md

contentTracing

Collect tracing data from Chromium's content module for finding performance bottlenecks and slow operations.

Process: Main

This module does not include a web interface so you need to open chrome://tracing/ in a Chrome browser and load the generated file to view the result.

Note: You should not use this module until the ready event of the app module is emitted.

const { app, contentTracing } = require('electron')

app.on('ready', () => {
  const options = {
    categoryFilter: '*',
    traceOptions: 'record-until-full,enable-sampling'
  }

  contentTracing.startRecording(options, () => {
    console.log('Tracing started')

    setTimeout(() => {
      contentTracing.stopRecording('', (path) => {
        console.log('Tracing data recorded to ' + path)
      })
    }, 5000)
  })
})

Methods

The contentTracing module has the following methods:

contentTracing.getCategories(callback)

• callback Function
  • categories String[]

Get a set of category groups. The category groups can change as new code paths are reached.

Once all child processes have acknowledged the getCategories request the callback is invoked with an array of category groups.

Deprecated Soon

contentTracing.getCategories()

Returns Promise<String[]> - resolves with an array of category groups once all child processes have acknowledged the getCategories request

Get a set of category groups. The category groups can change as new code paths are reached.

contentTracing.startRecording(options, callback)

• options (TraceCategoriesAndOptions | TraceConfig)
• callback Function

Start recording on all processes.

Recording begins immediately locally and asynchronously on child processes as soon as they receive the EnableRecording request. The callback will be called once all child processes have acknowledged the startRecording request.

contentTracing.stopRecording(resultFilePath, callback)

• resultFilePath String
• callback Function
  • resultFilePath String

Stop recording on all processes.

Child processes typically cache trace data and only rarely flush and send trace data back to the main process. This helps to minimize the runtime overhead of tracing since sending trace data over IPC can be an expensive operation. So, to end tracing, we must asynchronously ask all child processes to flush any pending trace data.

Once all child processes have acknowledged the stopRecording request, callback will be called with a file that contains the traced data.

Trace data will be written into resultFilePath if it is not empty or into a temporary file. The actual file path will be passed to callback if it's not null.

contentTracing.getTraceBufferUsage(callback)

• callback Function
  • value Number
  • percentage Number

Get the maximum usage across processes of trace buffer as a percentage of the full state. When the TraceBufferUsage value is determined the callback is called.