Support loading TraceX dumps in web-based trace visualization tools

[neilisaac]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The TraceX GUI only supports Windows. There are existing web-based trace visualization tools that could be leveraged to visualize TraceX traces with platform interoperability. Some of these tools provide additional analysis features.

Describe the solution you'd like

Conversion from the TraceX binary dump into a Chrome JSON trace format and/or Perfetto protobuf format for interoperability with existing tools.

Perfetto is a feature-rich GUI for time traces which supports both of these formats. In addition to trace visualization, it also supports querying events with SQL.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Other tools in this space include Speedscope: https://www.speedscope.app, Firefox profiler: https://profiler.firefox.com, the legacy Chrome profiler: chrome://tracing, and PProf: https://github.com/google/pprof (mainly for sampling profiles)

Writing a plugin or natively integrating support for loading tracex dumps into these applications could be an option as well.

Additional context

Proof-of-concept using the tracex_parser python package to convert to Chrome JSON format to load in Perfetto: https://gist.github.com/neilisaac/4c8dfcfe10da0e75a8945c71356bcd09

[fdesbiens]

Hi @neilisaac.

Thank you for this request. Our long-term goal is to replace the current WIndows-only GUIX Studio and TraceX with a cross-platform alternative. However, we currently lack the resources for this.

I like the idea of offering the dumps in a standards-based format. Integrating with existing third-party tools opens up possibilities.

Our team is still very small. I don't think we'll be able to work on this anytime soon. We would be happy to review contributions implementing your ideas if you want to pitch in, however.