User:Ankitm/GSoC 2020/gperftools installation on mac

gperftools installation and basic usage

Broader todo task for profiling Blender on Phabricator: #70016

Instruments.app is bundled with Xcode & provides easy CPU profiling. But it isn't available for other platform. perf based tools (for e.g. Hotspot, flamegraph, see see usage ) will work only on Linux. This won't work on windows but at least other two platforms can reproduce consistent results. Plus highly localised functions can be tested using gperftools.

27th May

gperftools finally worked. Here's the recipe: [1]

  • brew install gpertools
  • brew install graphviz
  • Insert this line in the platform specific file among these files on diffusion. I used platform_apple.cmake.
    Use pkg-config --libs libprofiler to find out the path to the library & the flag.
    set(PLATFORM_LINKFLAGS "${PLATFORM_LINKFLAGS} -L/usr/local/Cellar/gperftools/2.7/lib -lprofiler")
  • Use this in a C/C++ file around the function to profile.
#include </usr/local/include/gperftools/profiler.h>  
ProfilerStart("/tmp/data.prof");
int a = 47;
for (long int i = 0; i < __INT32_MAX__; i++) {
 a = a*a;
 a = a%178948;
} 
ProfilerStop();
  • Build, run, execute the function. Verify that the console has similar in the output:
    PROFILE: interrupts/evictions/bytes = 3532/1448/174440
  • Then run this to see an svg in your web browser. For text, instead of --web, use --text.
    pprof --web /path/to/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender /tmp/data.prof

[1]:

You can build it from source too. Download the source code from https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools/releases

cd gperftools

./configure OR ./configure --prefix=/path/to/destination

make

make install

Then separately install graphviz. I cannot comment on that since I didn't build it.

References:

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