Chromium tracing is good for the static tracepoints already included. That instrumentation shows how things are working inside Chromium. For system calls, it can only hint which tracing event was called closer.

For that case, debuggers or sampling profilers could give more insight.

trace-chrome allows to capture and store the traces from a different computer, with a simple command line interface. I published it in github.com/jdapena/trac...

In performance research, a principle is reducing the overhead of the analysis tools, to improve the accuracy. Tracing remotely helps: no need for the tracing UI to be available, and no overhead of running it. This is specially useful when Chromium runs in an embedded device.

This post is the third part of my series "Maintaining Chromium downstream". You can read the previous posts here: blogs.igalia.com/dape/tags/do...

It can be tested with any web page using the Chrome extension at github.com/bloomberg/co... or the examples at github.com/bloomberg/co...

By the way. I have been working on an experimental native implementation of the specification for Chromium. Feel free to try this patch: chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/s...