As I debug various performance-sinking scenarios, such as the instantiation and updating of expensive UI, it becomes incredibly difficult to accurately pinpoint and latch onto what exactly causes performance issues.
Currently, I am forced to employ a variety of tools:
- Listen to
DescendantAddedand even the eons-forgottenItemChangedevents, to pinpoint which properties are being updated more frequently than they should be - Manually look at & monitor which UIs are being updated when they shouldn’t be
- Gather microprofiler logs to get a better picture
All of these are very time-consuming, and never paint the full picture. A UI frame can be updated multiple times in the same frame, or several frames in a row, and without e.g. recording a video and looking through it in slow-motion, one frame at a time, it is hard to notice these subtleties.
It would be extremely helpful if we could step through the various engine simulation steps, one step at a time – through the UI update layout, to post-layout dispatching, to the other events like Stepped and Heartbeat, and anything inbetween them. Of course, I understand that many such steps are ran in parallel and are not synced with one another, and some only run every X frames, but its usefulness in debugging would far outweigh the negatives. It’d be much better than the existing tooling!
