easy_profiler

1. About
2. Key features
3. Usage
   • Prepare build system
     • General build system
     • CMake
   • Add profiling blocks
   • Collect blocks
     • Collect via network
     • Collect via file
     • Note about context-switch
4. Build
   • Linux
   • Windows
5. License

About

Lightweight cross-platform profiler library for c++

You can profile any function in you code. Furthermore this library provide measuring time of any block of code. For example, information for 12 millions of blocks is using less than 300Mb of memory. Working profiler slows your application execution for only 1-2%.

Average overhead per block is about 15ns/block (tested on Intel Core i7-5930K 3.5GHz, Win7)

Disabled profiler will not affect your application execution in any way. You can leave it in your Release build and enable it at run-time at any moment during application launch to see what is happening at the moment.

Also the library can capture system's context switch events between threads. Context switch information includes duration, target thread id, thread owner process id, thread owner process name.

You can see the results of measuring in simple GUI application which provides full statistics and renders beautiful time-line.

Profiling CryEngine SDK example

Key features

• Extremely low overhead
• Low additional memory usage
• Cross-platform
• Measuring over network
• Capture thread context-switch events
• Fully remove integration via defines
• GUI could be connected to an application which is already profiling (so you can profile initialization of your application)
• Monitor main thread fps at real-time in GUI even if profiling is disabled or draw your own HUD/fps-plot directly in your application using data provided by profiler
• Configurable timer type with CMakeLists or defines

Usage

Prepare build system

General

First of all you can specify path to include directory which contains include/profiler directory and define macro BUILD_WITH_EASY_PROFILER. For linking with easy_profiler you can specify path to library.

Build with cmake

If you are using cmake set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to lib/cmake/easy_profiler directory (from release package) and use function find_package(easy_profiler) with target_link_libraries(... easy_profiler). Example:

project(app_for_profiling)

set(SOURCES
    main.cpp
)

#CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH should be set to <easy_profiler-release_dir>/lib/cmake/easy_profiler
find_package(easy_profiler REQUIRED)

add_executable(app_for_profiling ${SOURCES})

target_link_libraries(app_for_profiling easy_profiler)

Add profiling blocks

Example of usage.

This code snippet will generate block with function name and Magenta color:

#include <easy/profiler.h>

void frame() {
    EASY_FUNCTION(profiler::colors::Magenta); // Magenta block with name "frame"
    prepareRender();
    calculatePhysics();
}

To profile any block you may do this as following. You can specify these blocks also with Google material design colors or just set name of the block (in this case it will have default color which is Amber100):

#include <easy/profiler.h>

void foo() {
    // some code
    EASY_BLOCK("Calculating sum"); // Block with default color
    int sum = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
        EASY_BLOCK("Addition", profiler::colors::Red); // Scoped red block (no EASY_END_BLOCK needed)
        sum += i;
    }
    EASY_END_BLOCK; // This ends "Calculating sum" block

    EASY_BLOCK("Calculating multiplication", profiler::colors::Blue500); // Blue block
    int mul = 1;
    for (int i = 1; i < 11; ++i)
        mul *= i;
    //EASY_END_BLOCK; // This is not needed because all blocks are ended on destructor when closing braces met
}

You can also use your own colors. easy_profiler is using standard 32-bit ARGB color format. Example:

#include <easy/profiler.h>

void bar() {
    EASY_FUNCTION(0xfff080aa); // Function block with custom color
    // some code
}

Collect blocks

There are two ways to cature blocks

Collect via network

It's most prefered and convenient approach in many case.

1. Initialize listening by profiler::startListen(). It's start new thread to listen on 28077 port the start-capture-signal from gui-application.
2. To stop listening you can call profiler::stopListen() function.

Collect via file

1. Enable profiler by EASY_PROFILER_ENABLE macro
2. Dump blocks to file in any place you want by profiler::dumpBlocksToFile("test_profile.prof") function

Example:

int main()
{
    EASY_PROFILER_ENABLE;
    /* do work*/
    profiler::dumpBlocksToFile("test_profile.prof");
}

Note about context-switch

To capture a thread context-switch event you need:

• On Windows: run profiling application "as administrator"
• On linux: you can run special systemtap script with root privileges as follow (example on Fedora):

#stap -o /tmp/cs_profiling_info.log scripts/context_switch_logger.stp name APPLICATION_NAME

APPLICATION_NAME - name of profiling application

Build

Prerequisites

For core:

• compiler with c++11 support
• cmake 3.0 or higher

For GUI:

• Qt 5.3.0 or higher

Linux

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release" ..
$ make

Windows

If you are using QtCreator IDE you can just open CMakeLists.txt file in root directory. If you are using Visual Studio you can generate solution by cmake generator command. Examples shows how to generate Win64 solution for Visual Studio 2013. To generate for another version use proper cmake generator (-G "name of generator").

Way 1

Specify path to cmake scripts in Qt5 dir (usually in lib/cmake subdir) and execute cmake generator command, for example:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:\Qt\5.3\msvc2013_64\lib\cmake" .. -G "Visual Studio 12 2013 Win64"

Way 2

Create system variable "Qt5Widgets_DIR" and set it's value to "[path-to-Qt5-binaries]\lib\cmake\Qt5Widgets". For example, "C:\Qt\5.3\msvc2013_64\lib\cmake\Qt5Widgets". And then run cmake generator as follows:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 12 2013 Win64"

License

Licensed under either of

• MIT license (LICENSE.MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE.APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

at your option.