Does perfetto UI support save UI states

[wangjiyang]

Hi,
Sometimes I use perfetto UI and do some analyzing and marking and want to save current visual states for late use. Is it possible to store it into whatever storage type? Eg, local files, browser cache or just url encoded parameters?

Thanks

[LalitMaganti]

I believe what you're asking for is #2551 which essentially allows the UI to create a snapshot of the trace + the state and gives you a link you can use go get back to exactly in the same state in the future.

If so, yes we're working on it! It's taking longer than we want due to dependencies on other teams but I believe the process is slowly moving forward. We should hopefully have something to share soon.

[mwb-experiments]

That works great, thanks a lot for the fast implementation!

(I tested with 09931e1 referenced in #6930 (comment))

This will work nicely for my own and for working on a single trace file.

It woukd be great if the UI state could be stored to/ loaded from a file instead of local storage.

This way, I could hand a .pftrace file along with some JSON or binary file to a colleague who can then continue work with where I've left. Most of my colleagues don't work on the frontend and won't know what local storage is or care about web browser development tools. And they (including myself here) won't know how to code TypeScript -- unless they ask an LLM to do the job for them.

In my understanding, there could be two ways:

1. Indirect approach: UI state -> local storage -> file download => file upload -> local storage -> UI state (extending the current solution)
2. Direct approach: UI state -> file download => file upload -> UI state

Injecting some additional helper code for import/export into the page via development tools would be a usability issues for my colleagues.

Could this be embedded into Perfetto UI directly or a plugin?

Thanks a lot for your time and help!

---

Edit: just stumbled across #6931, so it seems you're already working on that. 😄

[LalitMaganti]

We're discussing internally on how we want to implement this: there might be a way we can avoid the second file entirely and bake it into a tar file in the manifest. Or we might do it separately; no decision has been made yet, we'll see.

[stevegolton]

FYI #6930 just landed - which adds workspaces to the serialised state.

[mwb-experiments]

Thanks, that's great news!

I am curious when this will be available through https://ui.perfetto.dev/

In other words: How often is Perfetto UI released?

When I look at https://help.perfecto.io/perfecto-help/content/perfecto/release-notes/release_highlights.htm, it looks like monthly and the last release has been on August 30. So roughly in a month, right?

Thanks again!

[LalitMaganti]

Yes the stable UI is approx once a month.

Canary is released every week and there's a hidden autopush channel which is automatically run on every commit.