Open, import and capture snapshots

Capture a snapshot

You can capture a snapshot from the Editor, from an application running in Play mode in the Editor, or from a player running on your local machine or connected device. Use the Attach to Player dropdown in the Profiler Window toolbar to choose between these options.

By default, the Memory Profiler captures Editor snapshots. When an application is running in Play mode or in a Player, Unity adds those options to the dropdown menu. They don't appear in the dropdown if no application is running.

After you choose a capture target in the dropdown menu, you can use the following buttons to capture a new snapshot:

  • The Capture New Snapshot button is visible in the Memory Profiler window when you have no snapshots selected.
  • The Capture button is always visible in the control bar in the Memory Profiler window.

Both buttons perform the same operation. Alongside the Capture button on the control bar there is a Choose Capture Flags dropdown menu, which you can use to configure the snapshot. See the table entry in Memory Profiler window for more information.

You can also capture a memory snapshot through a script. For information about how to capture snapshots this way, see the Memory Profiler.TakeSnapshot Scripting API documentation. For more information about using custom metadata with snapshots in code, see MetaData and Add Player hook.

Import snapshots

If you already have access to existing memory snapshots, you can import them into the Memory Profiler. You can import a snapshot in any of the following ways:

Copy snapshots into the Project folder

  1. Inside your Project folder, find or create a folder named MemoryCaptures.
  2. Copy the snapshot files to this folder.
  3. Open the Memory Profiler window, and you can see the added snapshot in the Snapshots component.

Use the Import button in the Snapshots component

  1. In the Memory Profiler window toolbar, click on the Import button. This opens a file browser window.
  2. In the file browser window, locate and open the memory snapshot you want to import. When you import a .snap file, Unity copies the file to your MemoryCaptures folder. Unity creates this folder if it doesn't already exist.

Opening snapshots

To open a single snapshot and view its associated data, select the snapshot from the list in the Snapshot Panel with a single click. Opening a snapshot might take a long time because a snapshot can contain a lot of data.

To open two snapshots and compare them, enable the Compare Snapshots mode in the Open Snapshots pane, then select the two snapshots you want to compare from the list.

The Main component then displays different visualizations of the snapshot data.

Tip

Clicking the snapshot name doesn't open the snapshot; instead, this opens a renaming text box which you can use to rename the snapshot.