How to record a Superluminal capture

Superluminal is a sampling performance profiling tool used by MAK. It provides more information than the Tracy profiler like:

• Thread States

• Thread Interactions

• Timing of all invoked functions since no profiling markers are needed

Use of Superluminal to analyze Superluminal captures requires a license; however, the Superluminal command-line tool can be used to create Superluminal captures and does not require a license. The Superluminal command-line tool can be used by users of MAK products to record performance issues within a Superluminal capture which can be shared with MAK engineers for analysis.

Tracy traces are preferred over Superluminal captures because Tracy works on Linux (Superluminal does not), Tracy traces are smaller in size and generally have enough information that allow MAK engineers to assist in most cases. MAK may request Superluminal captures to get more information about performance problems in certain cases where Tracy traces are not sufficient.

This article discusses how to use the Superluminal command-line tool to create Superluminal captures. This article will not discuss every feature of the Superluminal command-line tool, but documentation is provided by Superluminal here.

Walkthrough

You will need a copy of the Superluminal command-line tool before getting started. The Superluminal command-line tool is provided by MAK support.

1. Start by running the MAK application(s) of interest and getting to a point where you are seeing the performance issues you would like MAK engineers to analyze

   1. This can vary widely between customer use cases - some customers have complicated terrains which exhibit performance problems and other customers may have complicated scenarios, high entity counts, custom plugins, or high-fidelity models.

2. (Optional) Get the PID of the MAK application(s) exhibiting the performance problems

   1. You can get this from the Windows Task Manager

3. In a console window, attach the Superluminal command-line tool to the MAK application of interest:

   1. If you know the PID, this is the command you should use:
      SuperluminalCmd attach windows --process-id [KNOWN_PID_HERE]

   2. If you do not know the PID, you could attach by process name instead:
      SuperluminalCmd attach windows --process-name [APPLICATION_NAME_HERE]

4. Let the Superluminal command-line tool run for a period time where the MAK application is exhibiting the performance issues to address. Once that period of time has passed, press the 's' key in the console window to stop the capturing profiling information.

   1. Note, the profiling information written to disk can be quite large when running the Superluminal command-line tool for a long period of time.

5. Once the Superluminal capture is saved to disk, send it to the MAK support team for analysis.

   1. Work with MAK support to arrange how this Superluminal capture will be sent.

Here is an example run of the Superluminal command-line tool: