Tracking https://github.com/firefox-devtools/Gecko-Profiler-Addon/issues/170 in bugzilla, because this will likely be fixed in-tree.

Copying the initial description from padenot here:

Short of having the ability to record all threads all the time, it would be interesting to be able to have a single tickbox/dropdown that would start recording a certain group of threads and apply some settings for a particular use case.

In my situation (BMO#1568286), I need to have a user record a profile of something on their computer, that I can't repro myself. I had to find the names of the threads to profile, by entering *, in the thread list (* does not seem to work for some reason, filed as #169). Then I captured the profile and listed manually the threads to record, in my case:

GeckoMain,Compositor,MediaPDecoder,MediaTimer,MediaPlayback,MediaDecoderStateMachine

Then, after capturing the profile I had to manually click to display the right lanes (which is not a big deal since I'm going to do it, not the user I'm getting the profile from), but could be smoother, I've already told the profiler which threads I was interested in (filed as #168).

Taking as example what I know best, media, it would go like this:

• The user chooses a particular "mode", say, Media
• This lower the interval to 1ms (or the lowest the platform can do, I just say #158), increases window length and buffer size
• It disables screenshoting (this has too much interplay with our type of workload and is not necessary) and other options that we don't need
• It adds a specific set of threads to profile, but other threads can be manually added

Some integration with #163 would be amazing, since Gecko developers would be responsible to maintain the list of threads and settings for a particular use case.

I'm going to morph this bug into a "configurable profiler presets" bug. This Bug depends on the new profiler popup UX work, and the about:profiling page. However, it has quite a few dependencies, in particular Bug 1597381.

I'm closing this in favor of bug 1652044 and bug 1640183.