Optimising your script

Luarmor uses Luraph™️ as the obfuscation provider. So if you’re experiencing lags, fps drops, or even crashes, you must use certain macros in your script. This documentation will show you everything about the LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE macro

Why does obfuscation affect performance?

Because Luraph™️ is a VM based obfuscator that generates its own instructions that are interpreted by Luraph, which, in turn, is interpreted by the Lua interpreter. So the number of instruction cycles increases exponentially.

How obfuscation works

Normally, your script gets compiled into a set of Lua instructions. See the example below:

How Lua code is compiled to bytecode

As you can see, your simple “print” statement gets compiled into 4 instructions. Each instruction is a cycle, so it will take 4 cycles to execute your code.

When you obfuscate your script, the main goal is to make the original code unreadable. Luraph does this by generating its custom instruction set that can be understood by Luraph VM only.

See the example below:

How Luraph obfuscates Lua code

Notice how your simple print statement turned into 40 instructions, which will take 40 cycles to execute. Also keep in mind that Luraph does a lot of things to obfuscate the code flow, which will ultimately lead to even more instructions.

Normally, Lua is extremely fast, therefore you will not notice any performance impact. But when your code runs hundreds of times per second, there will be obvious lags, fps drops, or even freezes during the execution of the instructions above.

A good example would be RenderStepped connections. At this point, everyone knows that you love wrapping your wallhack render function inside this RenderStepped event.

RenderStepped example

Example of a RenderStepped connection

This code will be slow when obfuscated. Because the number of instructions generated by Luraph will be more than 2000. This means Lua will have to run 2000+ instruction cycles every frame. Which will be around 60 * 2000 = 120k instructions to run every second.

And there are local functions (e.g. CalculateParameters) used in this loop, which automatically means that function will be executed as well, which will lead to even more and more instructions to run.

Here is a second example. A metamethod hook on __index:

__index example

Example of a metamethod hook

__index runs quite often. Example:

• game.Workspace,
• game.Players...
• etc…

These will invoke the __index function and run the code above. This will be extremely resource intensive and heavy, considering that it is probably called thousands of times per second.

And on top of that, if you obfuscate this part, you will end up with more than a million instructions to run every second, which will crash your game.

How to deal with this problem?

Do not wrap your entire script in LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE as it defeats the purpose of virtualization (obfuscation). Only use this macro if a function runs more than 30 times per second.

You have to exclude these chunks from obfuscation. You can either use loadstring(), or LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE.

It is recommended to use LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE instead of loadstring while excluding chunks from obfuscation, because it is generally harder to view the code when you’re using LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE.

How to use LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE?

LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE takes one constant argument which must be a function, and returns a function that can be called.

It is important to add this on top of your script, so you won’t have issues while running the original code.

    getfenv().LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE = function(f) return f end;

You will find some examples below on how to properly use LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE:

Good usage

RunService.RenderStepped(LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE(function(s)
    -- regular function body
end))

old = hookmetamethod(game, "__index", LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE(function(t, k)
    -- regular function body
end))

local generateTracers = LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE(function(pos, pos2)
    -- function body
end)
RunService.Hearbeat:Connect(generateTracers)

LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE(function()
    for i,v in pairs(getgc()) do 
        if type(v) == 'table' then
            f = v
        end
    end
end)()

Bad usage

local function doSomething()
-- function body
end
LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE(doSomething) -- you can't pass reference arguments
hookfunction(print, doSomething)

LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE( -- this is a syntax error
    local old old = hookmetamethod(game, "__namecall", function(...) end)
)

LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE(function()
    -- something
end) -- This part will not run because you are not calling it at the end.
-- You should add an extra () at the end in order to call it

print('done')

Where to use LPH_NO_VIRTUALIZE?

• RenderStepped connections
• Heartbeat connections
• __index metamethod hooks
• __namecall metamethod hooks (optional)
• while true loops with no delay
• GC scan loops
• functions, if they are called by one of those above