Processor Trace Instrument
Victor Wynne (via Hacker News):
Apple’s latest addition to Xcode, the Processor Trace instrument, is one of those features that sounds pretty mundane until you actually try it. Then you realize it’s exactly what you’ve been needing for the performance mysteries that eat up hours upon hours of your development time.
If you’ve been developing apps for a while, this story will sound very familiar. Your app runs fine in testing, but then users complain about performance issues or excessive battery drain. You fire up Instruments, poke around with Time Profiler, and maybe get some clues about which functions are eating CPU cycles. But often you’re left guessing about what’s really happening at the processor level. The true black hole of development work.
That’s where Processor Trace comes in. This tool captures every single branching decision your code makes at the CPU level, then presents it in a way that actually makes sense. Instead of statistical sampling like most profilers, you get a complete picture of your app’s execution flow. It’s the difference between taking random snapshots of a busy intersection versus having a complete video recording of all the traffic passing through.
See also: WWDC 2025.
God I love Instruments.
And to think that Microsoft killed our awesome Instruments-inspired profiler for C# and people have to use that tasteless and useless profiler on windows.
Previously:
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Does Instruments have anything like the performance optimization suggestions that Shark had?
