Better colors in memory map view

Performance & Profiling Profiling Tools
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1

I have to use the memory map feature quite often lately.
I find myself really struggling with the colors chosen for this view.

5644960--586672--heap_64.png
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The Yellow and the blue clearly stand out, but the various shades of grean make it very hard understand what is what.
I see

  • black: from the unity pro skin (I assume this is empty memory, but it’s not in the legend so I’m guessing here.)
  • Very dark green: Virtual memory
    * Less dark green: Native memory (Reserved)
    * Medium green: Native memory (Allocated)

Those colors seem the most problematic.
Also please try this with your displays set to a low brightness. The different tints of green get even more unreadable.

Additionally I find it very hard to map a section of memory on the bottom of this view, with a tiny square at the top of the screen.
My eyes start at the section of Memory that I’m interested in, and then have to scan over an array of colors to find the legend.By the time my eyes have found the legend, I forgot the shade of color I was looking for.

5644960--586675--upload_2020-3-29_19-31-2.png
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Some potential improvements I see:

  • Bigger legends
  • More distinct colors
  • Displaying the type of memory (+ useful information like size of the block), on hover

Let me know what you think.

Kind regards,

Pieter

2

Hi Peter,

Thank you for the detailed feedback. You’re right and the colors chosen here are a bit too close together. I’ll take a look at improving this and the other points you’ve mentioned when I’m going to go over the different views after my current vacation.

Thanks again,
Martin

3

Thank you for your reply Martin,
Enjoy your vacation!

4

Hi @MartinTilo

Here’s some more feedback:
Tree map:
Something that I find myself needing a lot of time:
A total amount of allocated memory in the Tree Map.
Mockup of expected behaviour:

5694682--594829--upload_2020-4-10_14-10-59.png
5694682--594829--upload_2020-4-10_14-10-59.png960×650 215 KB

Having the total amount of memory for each group is interesting, but I’m often also looking for the total amount of allocated memory. I often find myself guessing at it based on the size of the tiles

Also, when you click on a tile in the tree map, you can now see detailed results, but you again lose the total amount of allocated memory for that tile.
Mockup of expected behaviour:

5694682--594832--upload_2020-4-10_14-12-1.png
5694682--594832--upload_2020-4-10_14-12-1.png962×676 284 KB

Also, there’s no way that I know of, to step back out of the tile details, except for clicking another tile. So once you clicked, you can never see the allocated memory size overview anymore, except by going to the memory map view and back.

Memory map
Navigation of the back button is very tricky because its position depends on the name of the object that you have selected.
If you’re looking for references, it can be pretty tedious to go back to the diff view because of this.
Position of back and forward should always be in the same position.
5694682--594847--upload_2020-4-10_14-26-38.png

Thanks,

Pieter

5

Hi again,

Just a small update on this:

While we should’ve looked at this earlier, we’ve now discovered that their darkness in 2019.x versions is actually a regression due to Texture2D now assuming non-linear color space by default :frowning: . You can track that issue here. The main part of the issue is solved but we’re still looking into the other issues that popped up while looking at this.

6

FYI, the fix for the Linear Color Space issue has just landed with the release o com.unity.memoryprofiler@0.2.6-preview.1 . As noted out on the issue tracker item. We’ll continue to look into further issues with colors and Memory Map though.