1823370 - Control the profiler using signals

Status: NEW

(Core :: Gecko Profiler, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

By being able to control the profiler by sending signals to the firefox process (to start and stop+capture), we could make it easier to capture a profile in these cases where the firefox' main process is frozen.

Comment 1

[Nazım Can Altınova [:canova][:canaltinova on phabricator]]

Indeed this would be a good feature to have. It's usually not easy to profile when Firefox is frozen.

Comment 2

[Adam Brouwers-Harries [:aabh] [he/him] ⌚GMT]

Thoughts from discussion with julienw:

• Dumping profile when stopping the profiler may be necessary if we have a "stuck" main thread, as the front-end won't be accessible.
• Do we need to support kill-all, or can we rely on IPC to propogate the command to end the profiler.
• Is it the main thread/process that is gathering all the data? What happens if there is an issue with that process?