Limits

Recording size

Keep recordings under roughly 100,000 executed steps. Beyond that the viewer starts to feel slow — it is drawing every execution, and the count is what costs.

The Tracking tab shows the step count live while you record, so you can see where you are before you stop.

Recording less

The count is driven by executions, not by wall-clock time, so a five-second recording of a tight loop can be larger than a five-minute recording of a user clicking around. To keep it down:

• Start the recording immediately before the thing you want to look at, and stop it immediately after.
• Profile one slow script rather than a whole session.
• For a loop over ten thousand records, record a run over a hundred instead — the shape of the per-iteration cost is the same, and that is what you are looking for.

Platform limits

fmTrace runs on Apple Silicon Macs, macOS 12.0 or later, with FileMaker Pro 19 – 26. There is no Intel build and no Windows build. See the FAQ for why.

Beta limits

fmTrace is still in beta. Things move: the file format has changed across releases, and it may change again. Recordings from older builds keep opening in newer viewers — but if you are keeping a recording as a long-term reference, note which build produced it.