Orbit, the Open Runtime Binary Instrumentation Tool is a standalone native application profiler for Windows and Linux. It supports native applications written in languages such as C, C++, Rust, or Go. Its main purpose is to help developers identify the performance bottlenecks of a complex application. Orbit can be also used to visualize the execution flow of such applications.
The key differentiator with many existing tools is that no alteration to the target process is necessary. Orbit does not require you to change a single line of code. It doesn't require you to recompile or even relaunch the application you want to profile. Everything is done seamlessly, right when you need it. It requires zero integration time and zero iteration time.
Orbit combines sampling and dynamic instrumentation to optimize the profiling workflow. Sampling can quickly identify interesting functions to instrument. Dynamic instrumentation results in exact function entry and exit information which is presented in the form of per-thread hierarchical call graphs. Manual instrumentation markers can be added to the source code and further allows for value-tracking. Scheduling events are also shown to visualize when a thread was running and on what core. Furthermore, Orbit visualizes thread dependencies, showing which thread got blocked or unblocked by which other thread. For AMD GPUs, the submission, scheduling and hardware execution timings of a job is visualized. Additional GPU data, such as Vulkan debug markers can be retrieved using Orbit's Vulkan layer. Memory consumption and page-fault information is visualized as well.
An introduction to Orbit's key features can be found in the following YouTube
video:
- Dynamic Instrumentation (no code change required)
- Callstack Sampling
- Wine/Proton Mixed-Callstack Profiling
- Thread Scheduling and Dependency Tracing
- Memory Tracing
- GPU Driver Tracepoints (AMD only)
- Vulkan Debug Label and Command Buffer Tracing (AMD only)
- Manual Instrumentation
- Source Code and Disassembly View
- Remote Profiling
- Debug Symbol Parsing (ELF, DWARF, PE and PDB)
- Full Serialization of Captured Data
Orbit's focus has shifted to the Linux version. Windows local profiling is currently only supported partially and major features, such as dynamic instrumentation, are not yet implemented. It is possible however to profile Linux executables from a Windows UI instance. For Windows local profiling, please use the released binaries.
Please have a look at the first three sections of our development documentation. It describes how to build Orbit and which compilers, platforms, and tools are supported and needed.
Note An extensive documentation of the usage of Orbit can be found in our usage documentation.
The following describes the basic workflow of Orbit:
- Select a process in the list of currently running processes in the connection setup dialog, and click Start Session.
- The list of loaded modules will appear at the top of the Symbols tab.
- Orbit tries to automatically retrieve debug information of the modules. See here on how to load symbols for modules Orbit failed to load. For successfully loaded module symbols, the Functions tab will get populated.
- Select functions you wish to dynamically instrument in the Functions tab by Right-Click and choosing Hook.
- Start profiling by pressing F5. To stop profiling, press F5 again. You can either zoom time using W and S or Ctrl + the scroll wheel. You can also Ctrl+Right-Click and drag to zoom to a specific time range. To scale the UI, press Ctrl + +/-. Press SPACE to see the last 2 seconds of capture.
- You can select sections of the per-thread sampling event track to get a sampling report of your selection.
Once you have loaded the debug information for your modules and have chosen functions of interest to dynamically instrument, you can save your profiling preset so that you won't have to do this manually again. To save a preset, go to File > Save Preset
Questions and comments are more than welcome: please open an issue.
Orbit was created by Pierric Gimmig, but is now developed and maintained by a team of engineers at Google. The current maintainers are:
- @akopich
- @antonrohr
- @beckerhe
- @danielfenner
- @dimitry-
- @dpallotti
- @florian-kuebler
- @karupayun
- @pierricgimmig
- @reichlfl
- @ronaldfw
- @vickyliu-go4it
- @vwbaker
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