@mraleph has made it possible for the VM Service to return Perfetto-format timeline protos with interned strings, which can be much smaller than protos without interned strings. A measurement that he recorded showed that a timeline containing 60k slices went from 15MB to 5MB once interned strings were used. The Perfetto trace viewer knows how to decode interned strings, but since DevTools reads the data in timeline protos itself, it will need to be migrated before it can take advantage of the size reduction.
To migrate, DevTools needs to upgrade to package:vm_service_protos 2.0.0, and then implement deinterning as done in https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/cfeda654176d7c2cf006eeef269a458cdf977f32/pkg/vm_service/test/get_perfetto_vm_timeline_rpc_test.dart#L42. To test the migration, the VM flag --intern-strings-when-writing-perfetto-timeline makes it so that getPerfettoVMTimeline VM Service RPCs return protos with interned strings. Once the migration is complete, --intern-strings-when-writing-perfetto-timeline can become the VM's default behaviour.
@mraleph has made it possible for the VM Service to return Perfetto-format timeline protos with interned strings, which can be much smaller than protos without interned strings. A measurement that he recorded showed that a timeline containing 60k slices went from 15MB to 5MB once interned strings were used. The Perfetto trace viewer knows how to decode interned strings, but since DevTools reads the data in timeline protos itself, it will need to be migrated before it can take advantage of the size reduction.
To migrate, DevTools needs to upgrade to
package:vm_service_protos 2.0.0, and then implement deinterning as done in https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/cfeda654176d7c2cf006eeef269a458cdf977f32/pkg/vm_service/test/get_perfetto_vm_timeline_rpc_test.dart#L42. To test the migration, the VM flag--intern-strings-when-writing-perfetto-timelinemakes it so thatgetPerfettoVMTimelineVM Service RPCs return protos with interned strings. Once the migration is complete,--intern-strings-when-writing-perfetto-timelinecan become the VM's default behaviour.