As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to understand what is causing your game lag using the MicroProfiler.
I think that the MicroProfiler should provide more descriptive labels / notes that explain (even just roughly) what each bar, or the most prominent bars represent.
Labels like these are helpful, but only to a certain degree. They are mostly key words to help engineers sort out what section an issue may be coming from. To add onto this, over 90% of the tracked sources in the MicroProfiler do not have this “Label” tag, so for the average developer it is almost entirely useless.
The MicroProfiler is a very powerful tool that has the potential to help you completely eliminate any unnecessary lag in a game. It is very useful in the fact that it allows you to see a rundown of what is happening in your game frame by frame. Unfortunately for your typical developer (who is not an expert on the inner workings of the Roblox Engine) the MicroProfiler tends to be almost useless as no where on any of Roblox’s Developer Hub pages or in the MicroProfiler itself does it give a detailed explanation of what each label entails.
Here is an example of one of my places:
From first glance you can see that Scene, Shadows, Perform, Id_Opaque, ect… are taking a fairly large amount of time to execute. Some of the labels are obvious - Shadows are obviously shadows caused by the lighting. But what about Scene, Perform or Id_Opaque? What are these? What is causing them to take so long to execute? How can we fix that?
The MicroProfiler should show more plain-language information than it currently does. Otherwise, much more info in general should be available on the MicroProfiler.
This would vastly improve the overall quality of games on Roblox as developers would have an easier time figuring out how to improve the performance of their game.