Safe Scope-Based Instrumented Profiler

This post is part of my Game Programming Series.

Let’s say we have an interface for an instrumented profiling library that looks like this:

namespace Profiler
{
  void BeginBlock(const char *name);
  void EndBlock(void);
};

The argument you pass to BeginBlock is a custom block name for you to identify the block in the profiler output.

You call BeginBlock at the beginning of a block of code and call EndBlock when the program exits the block.

void GameLoop(void)
{
  Profile::BeginBlock("GameLoop");
    UpdateInput();
    UpdatePhysics();
    UpdateLogic();
    Render();
  Profile::EndBlock();
}

Let’s say you also inserted the proper calls to the profiling functions inside the functions you wish to profile, then the profiler might give you an output like this:

GameLoop - 16.0ms // 60fps, woo~
  |--UpdateInput - 1.0ms
  |--UpdatePhysics - 10.0ms
  |    |--InitRigidBodies - 0.1ms
  |    |--SolveConstraints - 0.6ms
  |    |--IntegrateRigidBodies - 0.3ms
  |--UpdateLogic - 5.0ms

This all depends on the fact that you properly call the EndBlock function before the program exits a block of code. What if, say, someone decides to throw in an early-out inside one of your functions and forgets to call EndBlock?

void MyFunction(void)
{
  Profile::BeginBlock("MyFunction");

  // 1000 lines of code

  if (someCondition)
  {
    // whoops
    return;
  }
 
  // 1000 lines of code

  Profile::EndBlock();
}

If you’ve read my previous post about scope-based resource management, then you can probably already tell what I’m leading up to. We can let the compiler insert proper code that calls EndBlock for us at the exit points of a block of code, making use of the constructor and destructor of a helper object on the stack.

Here’s our helper class:

class ProfilerBlock
{
  public:
  
    ProfilerBlock(const char *name)
    {
      Profiler::PushBlock(file);
    }

    ~ProfilerBlock(void)
    {
      Profiler::EndBlock();
    }
};

// helper macro that generates an object name
#define PROFILER_BLOCK(name) \
  ProfilerBlock profiler_##name##(name)

Our function now becomes:

void MyFunction(void)
{
  PROFILE_BLOCK("MyFunction");

  // 1000 lines of code

  if (someCondition)
  {
    // PopBlock automatically called here
    return;
  }
 
  // 1000 lines of code
  
  // PopBlock automatically called here
}

Now we have a safe scope-based instrumented profiler!

About Allen Chou

Physics / Graphics / Procedural Animation / Visuals
This entry was posted in C/C++, Gamedev. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Safe Scope-Based Instrumented Profiler

  1. Steven Stewart-Gallus says:

    You know you can use a __func__ identifier to get the function name in C++11 right?

    • Allen Chou says:

      Yes, I do. However, the approach shown here allows you to specify custom name for a profiler block that is not necessarily the same as the function name. So you can have nested profiler blocks within a single function with descriptive names.

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