Editor or standalone instances

The only way to access the Profiler is to launch it through the Unity Editor and connect it to a running instance of our application. This is the case whether we're executing our game in Play Mode within the Editor, running a standalone application on the local or remote device, or we wish to profile the Editor itself.

To open the Profiler, navigate to Window | Profiler within the Editor:

If the Editor is already running in Play Mode, then we should see reporting data actively gathering in the Profiler window.

To profile standalone projects, ensure that the Development Build and Autoconnect Profiler flags are enabled when the application is built.

Choosing whether to profile an Editor-based instance (through the Editor's Play Mode) or a standalone instance (built and running separately from the Editor) can be achieved through the Connected Player option in the Profiler window:

Note that switching back to the Unity Editor while profiling a separate standalone project will halt all data collection since the application will not be updated while it is in the background.

Note that the Development Build option is named Use Development Mode and the Connected Player option is named Active Profiler in Unity 5.