Studio improvements to reduce the frequency of hangs

Updates Announcements
#1

Hi Creators,

Over the course of 2024 we diligently worked behind-the-scenes to reduce the frequency of Studio session hangs for the community.

We know how frustrating it is to start an action and get stuck waiting for Studio to catch up. At the start of last year, we assembled a strike-team of engineers across Roblox to identify and address the most frequent and longest Studio hangs. We wanted to give you an update on the progress we made last year and a lookahead into what we’ll be working on throughout 2025.

What we did

We began by building in monitoring to identify the most common actions that caused Studio hangs, starting with some of the longer-running hangs we’ve experienced and heard from the community.

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This enabled us to categorize the types of session hangs by frequency and come up with the top categories to tackle. As shown in the graph above Place Open/Team Create represented 35% of total hangs, and Login/Start page peaked at 11% of total hangs. By fixing these top categories with rollout of the Place Open Improvements and rollout of faster access to the Next Generation Start Page after logging in, we were able to effectively eliminate 46% of total hangs.

What’s next for 2025

The changes we made in 2024 are a significant milestone in the ongoing effort to optimize Roblox Studio performance for creators. And because we now have monitoring capabilities, we can prevent the introduction of new hangs when new features and changes roll out.

This year the team will continue to address additional categories of hangs via further modularizing of Studio critical application components for increased reliability, observability, and performance. Our goal is to release more of these improvements more frequently throughout 2025. This includes the Next Gen Explorer, Properties window, and Next Gen Studio along with numerous other changes to improve your experience creating in Studio. We look forward to hearing your ideas and suggestions in the comments below!

Thanks

This was a dedicated group effort thanks to @AndroidYouth, @MoonRocketApollo, @Swmaniac, @anshulbhai, @ArmyOfCorgis, @vfxbot, @OfcMeowMeowFuzzyface, @Flatcharacter, @code4xp, @Kemtonrbx, @brienneofthetarth, @SwirlTheNumbers, @ZeroBecFam, @Anonymoose_bin, @DreamingMind, @Strange_times, @butterthebig, @Xtcwr, @ElephantMesh, @LunaFlare2024 and @Urukeli.

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#2

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#3

It would be pretty amazing to have better performance analysis tools specifically for plugins. Tools like the ability to look into the LuaHeap is fairly pointless since you need the game running to actually see it, and a lot of core game code will get in the way of the plugins (if the plugins even appear in it). Can we have a similar thing to it, as a Studio widget, that lets me see the memory usage of plugins in the debugger.

I dont know if plugins will appear in the microprofiler flamegraph, but I still dont know how to use that silly thing so I’m not sure.

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#4

Thank you for your work!
I highly appreciate it!

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#5

Such beautiful data visualizations! as a data analytics & stats nerd, these are super cool to see! It seems that after the initial fixes to the biggest troublemakers, there haven’t been any ‘significant’, i.e., huge, noticeable drops, in the studio hangs. Is it possible to know what the biggest hurdles are now, out of curiosity?

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#6

I think I was taking for granted how fast I’ve been able to work with studio recently but this definitely explains it. My project has about 8 places so these speed-ups really help with productivity.

I’m also as curious as @PysephDEV, could we possibly know what the other thingies are? :pleading_face:

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#7

Next gen studio, and especially next gen explorer, have only caused problems for me so far

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#8

Such beautiful data visualizations! as a data analytics & stats nerd, these are super cool to see!

Thanks! (@Urukeli is who came up with the visualization!)

It seems that after the initial fixes to the biggest troublemakers, there haven’t been any ‘significant’, i.e., huge, noticeable drops, in the studio hangs. Is it possible to know what the biggest hurdles are now, out of curiosity?

Studio has been around a long time and certain application components are due for upgrades as places and authoring workflows have gotten more complex. To this end, the team has been working through performance refactors of the code backing the Explorer window and the top toolbar and menus (both are currently in Beta while we’re working through bugs and bringing them up to feature parity). The thinking is once these are ready to be shipped, they will eliminate a few more categories of frequent hangs.

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#9

Thank you for trying them both out (and hopefully filing bugs?) while the features are in-Beta. I know our folks working on these components appreciate the community putting it to the test and sharing feedback on what’s working (and what’s not working) for your everyday workflows.

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#10

Awesome stuff overall. Though this may be just me but quite a lot of these changes don’t feel that major to begin with. Play testing is pretty fast these days though it’s only fast on the default baseplates (which I have to say that at this point, play testing could be quite a lot faster on what is mostly just 2 parts, a character and Roblox only code). Large places still suffer from prolongued wait times when play testing and stopping play tests. Streaming Enabled further adds it’s own wait times on play testing too.
Right now I still have to use task manager to close studio since it’s literally incapable of closing itself quickly within large places. Studio will often hang for minutes on end and even sometimes never actually shut off and remain as a small hidden process.

Personally so far I also can’t yet take the benefits of what the new explorer has to offer due to it being broken and/or missing critical features. (All of which I have mentioned in the next gen explorer thread)
I don’t mean to undermine the good work done here but again, so far I’m not that impressed by these optimizations.

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#11

Large places are their own special challenge. One of my favorite posts we’re keeping evergreen as the team works to tactically address pain points is this post.

Again, fixes can only go so far, which means behind-the-scenes we’re also researching ways to scale Studio for editing/authoring places even larger than the ones today. These have a longer time horizon though as much proofing, prototyping, and iteration needs to happen before we can put them on the Creator Roadmap.

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#12

I can add onto this.

I’ve tried the next gen studio and explorer betas and found that they cause my framerate to drop to 40 FPS on a computer that’s supposed to be able to run everything.

I run studio on a Ryzen 9 with 16 cores, 64gb RAM and a RTX 4070 ti and it STILL drops to 40 FPS on an empty baseplate when I have next-gen studio and explorer enabled, I had to switch back to old studio to run at normal speed again.

Next-gen studio definitely needs to be looked at before it’s released.

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#13

i’m no graph wiz, when i see that graph all i see is ‘funny rainbow is smaller, and smaller must mean less time taken to do things’. so I give it a 10 out of 10!

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#14

There is also this odd issue with studio right now
Sometimes just clicking your mouse in the studio game window while in edit mode causes some weird fps drops for a few seconds. This is more noticable if you are moving your camera around at the same time

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#16

Sometimes, you just focus on the most random things we developers don’t think of but will 100% increase our love for the engine as a whole . I’m a proud developer @ ROBLOX!

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#17

Really like the steps Roblox is taking towards Studio. I’ve been spoiled by other programs’ performance and using Roblox Studio felt archaic and lacking in comparison. But let’s hope it becomes a seamless experience in the near future.

Personally, I find team create/place opening/login not that big of a deal, considering you only see it a few times a day. What actually does kill my workflow and hangs the most in my development is the CTRL+SHIFT+F or Find All / Replace All.

The codebase doesn’t have to be huge at all but that functionality has the capacity to fully freeze studio when searching for small amounts of code, which requires restarting Roblox Studio. If there’s one thing that requires massive improvements, it’s that feature bar none. My only wish is to get this feature even 10% as fast as Visual Studio Code’s Find+All+Replace.

I end up not using this feature at all since it’s a landmine in any of my projects, and I often use CTRL+P to find the script instead (even if its less efficient).

Welcome changes nonetheless.

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#18

This is great news, especially for those with low-end PCs

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#19

This is brilliant to see.

Infact I switched platforms to Mac in early 2023 for a more reliable experience before these changes were even implemented, so knowing that there’s improvements on top of that is great news to me when I want to be able to iterate on my work quickly.

Happy to see that diagnosing and resolving performance issues has been a pretty large focus over the past year across many teams at roblox, especially occlusion culling!

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#20

Thanks for the feedback! Plugin performance has been an issue for us too (when we get bug reports and ultimately the performance woes are tied to a 3rd-party plugin) so we would love something like this too.

It has come up in discussion before, but I think there were certain challenges we would need to solve before reliable detection can happen. Will definitely bring up with the team though, and see if we can revisit the idea. Thanks for mentioning it!

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#21

Absolutely, that is why those features are in Beta since we don’t have the same hardware and setups available for testing the wide spectrum of dev machines.

If you haven’t already, please add your findings (including which Studio version number, e.g., ‘0.658’, since fixes go in on a weekly basis) into those Beta posts for Next Gen Studio and Explorer, where those teams are directly monitoring for feedback.

And thank you for trying out the Betas and sharing feedback!

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