ofxProfile

by Damian Stewart http://damianstewart.com

A thread-safe profiler. Stores and manages execution count, total execution time and average time per execution of each labelled section, separated by thread.

To use in a particular cpp file, you need to #define PROFILE either globally or in that file, and #include the ofxProfile.h header.

#define PROFILE
#include "ofxProfile.h"

Then use the following macros to profile parts of code:

• ofxProfileSectionPush(label) and ofxProfileSectionPop()

  Profile code between these calls, storing results in a tree. For example:

    .. unprofiled preprocessing
    ofxProfileSectionPush("partial section");
    .. code to be profiled
    ofxProfileSectionPop();
    .. unprofiled postprocessing
  

  Or for nested output:

    ofxProfileSectionPush("two-step process");
        .. preprocessing code
        ofxProfileSectionPush("step 1");
            .. step 1 code
        ofxProfileSectionPop();
        ofxProfileSectionPush("step 2");
            .. step 2 code
        ofxProfileSectionPop();
    ofxProfileSectionPop();
  

  will produce output like this:

        + two-step process      <total time for steps 1 + 2 + preprocessing> ...
    	  + step 1              <time for step 1> ...
    	  + step 2              <time for step 2> ...
  

  NOTE: all labels at a given level in the tree must be unique.

• ofxProfileThisFunction()

  Automatically wraps the current function in a pair of ofxProfileSectionPush(functionName) and ofxProfileSectionPop() calls.

• ofxProfileThisBlock(label)

  Wraps the current block (the code between the current level { and }) in a pair of ofxProfileSectionPush(label) and ofxProfileSectionPop() calls.

  eg:

        if ( test_condition )
        {
            ofxProfileThisBlock( "test passed" );
            // code to run on test condition
        }
  

To display profile results, call ofxProfile::display().

To fetch results as a string, call ofxProfile::describe().

To clear current results, call ofxProfile::clear().

Notes

• If PROFILE is not #defined, the profiling code is not executed. This means you can leave profiling code in place for release builds and not have it impact on performance.

• Profiling is invasive, this means it will have an impact on execution times. Output from ofxProfile is therefore not 100% accurate but is usually good enough to help nail down performance bottlenecks.

• OpenGL may do all sorts of interesting things behind your back, that ofxProfiler doesn't know about. If you want to profile OpenGL calls please use a proper OpenGL profiler instead.

original GitHub url: http://github.com/damiannz/ofxProfile