My co-founder Jelle wrote an article about a custom data structure he came up with for Superluminal to efficiently store millions of callstacks. Check it out!

I've been wanting to start a blog for a while, and finally decided to bite the bullet. The first article of hopefully many more to come is about, you guessed it, profiling & optimization. RTs appreciated! rovarma.com/articles/opt...

Great post! Including a sneak peek of a certain profiler on a platform that is very much not Windows ;-)

It's understandable that Unreal needs to touch a lot of files when starting the editor. But what if I told you that >5500 of those files are not needed for the editor to start at all and are just adding seconds to the editor launch time? (Fix included!) #u5 #gamedev larstofus.com/2025/09/27/s...

Nice investigation! Sampling profilers > instrumenting profilers when you need to see what’s happening in code you *didn’t* write. Great example of the right tool for the job!

My new blog post is there, and it's a bit different from usual: Fixing stutters in your own code is hard enough, but this time I try to fix performance issues in a closed-source game. No source code or debug symbols, but a lot of guesswork. larstofus.com/2025/07/27/p... #gamedev #Trackmania

Days since I've had to waste time debugging obscure issues caused by Linux's deranged shared library model: 0 "Nice that you're linking to a static library, but there's a shared lib loaded with the same symbol name in it, so I'm gonna use that one instead, ok?"

tfw you're collateral damage in the Great AI Wars

We've been micro-optimizing our eBPF code, and it reminds me of the SPU era a bit. The compiler/JIT is so basic that old tricks are useful again. Regular C turns into atrocious ASM, but writing C like it's ASM fixes it. I'm kinda loving it. It's all stuff like this (before/after):

Solved it by the ancient tradition of Just Reading The Code. Turns out continuously taking the RCU lock by inserting thousands of elements into a BPF_MAP_TYPE_LRU_HASH from within a NMI is Not Good for your system. Rolled our own (simpler) version directly in eBPF.

How does one diagnose the entire Linux system locking up when using a particular eBPF data structure? Are there any post-mortem logs to look at? dmesg is only about the current session. Asking for a friend.

Currently investigating & optimizing the perf of our eBPF-based capturing code, but there's no perf tooling for eBPF. So instead, we're profiling with manual instrumentation like savages. Ironically the very thing we originally set out to eliminate with Superluminal.

> visit website > notice it isn't working > open devtools > 36 errors I sometimes wonder how non-developers are supposed to use the internet nowadays. Are they just perpetually in a state of brokenness with no idea how to escape it, accepting this as 'normal'?

One thing people really like about Superluminal is that it Just Works, and we’re trying hard to get that same experience on Linux. But this platform sometimes really feels like it’s actively fighting against anything “just working” and it would really prefer you Do The Work tyvm.

*cracks knuckles* *starts writing Yet Another String Parser for Yet Another Commandline Tool*

The thing I perhaps miss the most while developing on Linux, besides obviously a good debugger, is Araxis Merge. I've been using Beyond Compare since we started on Linux support, and I just *cannot* get used to it. The diff view is just completely unparseable to my brain.

1) what

EINVAL, the "something went wrong" of the Linux kernel. What went wrong? Who knows, read the source!

reached the attempting (and failing) to debug the kernel stage of Linux development

Don’t think I’ve ever written as much string parsing code as I have while working on Linux support. /proc files, cmdline tool output, etc, so much stringly typed stuff. Feels bad knowing you’re really just doing binary data -> string -> binary data conversions all over the place.

Built a new PC with NVMe drives for the first time yesterday. Having grown up with the left side, I cannot adequately express how absolutely insane it is to me that the right side exists and is widely available today. how it started how it's going

Good thread on how performance problems are, once again, *never* where you expect them to be. Great investigation & fix by Rick. Profile all the things!

Co-signed. I remember the vibe shift in the early 00’s from ‘just write the code you need’ to ‘writing your own code is NIH syndrome’ to ‘NIH = bad’ and ‘DRY’. The dependency mess in modern dev is the conclusion of that movement. But we can shift it back. Proudly NIH all the things, friends.

We're going to be refreshing Superluminal's website this year. We have a pretty good idea of what to change, but I'm curious — In your own words, if you're using Superluminal, why do you like using it?

We've been investigating the crash reports that came in over the holidays, and a large % are null pointer crashes in very strange places in our licensing code. Looks like somebody had a fun time over the holidays trying to bypass our licensing system. So that's cool, I guess.

If you have captures with hundreds of thousands of loaded/unloaded DLLs, or processes with hundreds of thousands of threads, or captures with millions of functions in the function list, this is the update for you :-)

i've seen too many tech talks/presos that suffer from a few totally fixable issues, and decided to write about it: gpfault.net/posts/gripes...

One of the fun things about building a profiler is that we sometimes get a peek behind the curtain at the optimizations our users are making, and can confirm, it’s strings way more often than you’d expect :-)

We did not have “write a full terminal emulator / tmux-lite” on our bingo card for Linux support in @superluminal.eu, but here we are

I promised to look at shader graph undo next because we still see annoying stalls there. I have 3h of time today, let's see how far we get. blog.s-schoener.com/2024-11-20-u...

I am trying to get to the old context menu in the explorer in Windows 11. When you have the new menu open, you have to click "Show more options." This reliably freezes for 20s. Why? Let's take a look in @superluminal.eu.

More excellent profiling & optimization stuff!

Inspired by some recent work build times, I was looking at Unity's "MegaCity Metro" sample in Unity 6. I got curious about at its build times. In particular for incremental builds (fancy speak for "I pressed the build button repeatedly but only made minimal changes inbetween.")

In today's episode of "What am exactly I waiting for here?" I waited for Visual Studio to open 477 projects in a Unity Engine generated solution. It took > 15min. Did I attach a profiler? Why of course I did, because I ran out of patience and Superluminal is my only friend.

Have you ever wondered just how much of Unity's API surface you can make unmanaged? I did, and wrote many words about it here (with code!): blog.s-schoener.com/2024-11-02-u... #unity

Getting unreasonably excited about getting Superluminal on Linux out there. I’m seriously starting to wonder if anyone in the history of Linux has ever done full system profiling similar to what is possible on Windows with ETW, vs just profiling individual programs.

My starter pack should be up to date now with everyone who has asked to be added + a bunch of additional folks I've found Hit follow all again and please share - it helps me grow this list 🤘 There's still plenty of space. Suggesting others is also welcome 🤠 go.bsky.app/CEBHAe3

Today, in places I did not expect to find AI, while looking for a mobo for a new PC build. I guess Asus is an “AI-first” company now too?

Alright, set up a company account here as well :-) Follow for everything around Superluminal!

> debugserver died with an exit status of 0x00000000 Story of my debugging-on-Linux life. Sigh.

So, I guess we're doing this again, huh? :-) Quick intro. I'm Ritesh, and I've worked in the games industry for ~17 years, focusing on engine, tools & performance. I founded a company with a good friend, and we develop the Superluminal CPU profiler (superluminal.eu) Hoping for tech content here!