GNOME Shell Profiling

Now that we have a Gjs profiler we can start looking at doing some fun things with it.

Today I wrote a couple line patch to GNOME Shell to toggle on and off the profiler using SIGUSR2. So if you build Gjs and gnome-shell with the appropriate patches, you can do something like:

gnome-shell --wayland
# .. inside shell
kill -SIGUSR2 <pid>
# .. exercise shell a bit
kill -SIGUSR2 <pid>
# .. now look at /tmp/gjs-profile-$pid

If you open that file up with my Sysprof improvements, you can browse around the profile information containing JavaScript stacks.

It looks something like this.

Happy bug hunting!