How can I debug high cpu usage in electron?

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I'm writing an Electron app and a few builds back testers started noticing that two electron.exe processes were consuming a lot of CPU time all the time. One pegging a CPU core and the other using about 85% of a core.

I'm certain that this was not always the case as builds several months ago didn't do this. But I'm at a loss to know how to debug what code changes may have introduced this as the code base has evolved dramatically over that time.

process.getIOCounters() reports that several gigabytes of IO is occurring every few minutes. The application is not deadlocked and everything still works it is just chewing through CPU. It happens anytime the app is open even if it is in the background without any user input. I only have windows 10 x64 systems that I've deployed this to as Electron 1.7.9 and also 1.7.5.

Based on the behavior I'm certain that this IO is interprocess communication between the render and main threads, but I'm not manually performing any IPC. I think this problem is being caused by some module we've introduced that improperly resides in the rendered thread.

My question, how does one debug the The Electron render/main thread IPC pipe? Can it be hooked to know what the contents of the gigabytes of traffic are?

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1 Answers

Based on the past few days of attempting to debug this I've answer the question for myself:

My question, how does one debug the The Electron render/main thread IPC pipe?

Don't, electron seemed like a good idea, writing all your client and platform code in the same place. But there are a lot of catches, and out of the blue libraries will have strange bugs that are costly to address because they are outside the main stream use case. This certainly has a lot to do with me not being an Electron Expert, but in the real world there are deadlines and timelines and I can't always get up to speed as much as I would like to.

I've updated my architecture to the tried an true Service/GUI model. I'll be maintaining full browser support for the client code as well as an Electron mode with hooks for some features when electron is detected.

This allows me to quickly identify issues that are specific to browser, version or platform framework. It also lets me use which ever version of NodeJS that I would like to for the service which has also been an issue in my case.

I still love Electron though, I'm just going to be more careful as I use it. If I do discover the specifics of why I had this problem I'll check back and report those details.

Update

So this issue was not directly related to Electron like I had supposed, the IPC was not between the renderer and main threads and was a red herring. It was actually a chrome key frame animation issue which was causing a 60 FPS redraw rate, still not sure why this caused GBs of IPC, but whatever. See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/22900

I was able to discover this by porting this app back to native browser ( with nodejs service ). I then ran in chrome, edge and firefox. Only chrome behaved this way.

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