Workshell

Appearance

Performance and traces ​

Time the operations that make a game feel slow, such as joining, loading data or matchmaking, and see where the time goes.

Spans ​

The simplest way is Workshell.trace. It times a function, returns its results, and marks the span as an error (and reports the error) if the function throws:

lua
local data = Workshell.trace("datastore.load", function()
	return store:GetAsync(key)
end, player)

For work that spans callbacks, start and finish a span by hand:

lua
local span = Workshell.startSpan("matchmaking.find", { player = player, attrs = { mode = "ranked" } })
-- ...
span:setAttribute("candidates", #candidates)
span:finish()          -- or span:finish("error")

Traces ​

Children of a span share its trace, so one player's join can be broken into its parts:

lua
local join = Workshell.startSpan("player.join", { player = player })

local load = join:child("datastore.load")
local profile = store:GetAsync(key)
load:setAttribute("store", "PlayerData")
load:finish()

local spawn = join:child("character.spawn")
player:LoadCharacter()
spawn:finish()

join:finish()

The Performance page lists each span name with its count, p50, p95 and error rate. Open a slow run to see it as a waterfall of nested spans, or send it to a whiteboard, where it's drawn as a node graph with each span's duration.

Client and server health ​

The same page shows client frame rate, ping and memory by platform, including the share of time spent under 30 FPS. The Servers page shows each server's players, FPS, heartbeat time, memory, ping and network traffic, reported every 30 seconds.

Metrics ​

For numbers that aren't a duration of one operation:

lua
Workshell.increment("shop.opened")            -- counters are summed across servers
Workshell.gauge("matchmaking.queue", #queue)   -- gauges chart avg, min and max
Workshell.timing("ai.tick", ms)
local result = Workshell.time("pathfind", function()
	return path:ComputeAsync(a, b)
end)

Metrics are charted on the Metrics page.