Setting that works for me?
The arguments, e.g. at
ayon+settings://applications/applications/houdini/variants/4/arguments:
[
"-profile-startup=E:/performance.hperf"
]
The file gets written by Houdini as soon as the UI became visible.
Aside of that. If you use the ayon-applications addon from latest develop (or upcoming 1.0.0+) it will come with a Debug Terminal launcher action which makes it trivial to launch e.g. Houdini from command line within the AYON environment. There you could e.g. manually trigger Houdini with the relevant command line arguments.
It was added here: Add a Debug Terminal launcher which allows to launch a terminal into environment of an application by BigRoy · Pull Request #12 · ynput/ayon-applications · GitHub