Profiling VVL

The Tracy profiler has been setup. Get the doc here.

Tested with Tracy version 0.11

Relevant CMake options:

  • -D VVL_ENABLE_TRACY Enable Tracy
  • -D VVL_ENABLE_TRACY_CPU_MEMORY Enable Tracy CPU memory profiling
  • -D VVL_TRACY_CALLSTACK=<N> Define maximum collected call stack size (default: 48)

⚠️ Having a big call stack size can have a noticeable impact on performance

⚠️ Make sure your the various dependencies are compiled with the same optimisations levels and debug as VVL, otherwise expect crashes in TracyAlloc/Free

  • To enable retrieving data from kernel facilities, for instance to have fine grained info on CPU usage, run the application VVL is injected into with elevated privileges. If you use VkConfig to enable VVL, do not forget to also launch it with elevated privileges.

Limitations

  • You may notice a stall when shutting down the profiled application: have a look at the profiler, the “query backlog” (satellite icon, around top right) is probably being emptied. It can take some time.

  • Meant to be used with applications that do not live for only a small amount of time, and create only one VkInstance. => So for now, forget about profiling our test suite...

  • Manual profiler lifetimes are used: profiler is started when the VVL shared library is loaded, and it is shut down at vkDestoyInstance time. => It is thus assumed that application only create one instance, as of writing it appears to be the case in most applications.

  • CPU memory profiling cannot be used with Mimalloc. It needs to be setup, a quick stab at it showed that it is blowing up Tracy.