Miscellaneous

Profiling Minetest on Linux with perf

We will be using a tool called "perf", which you can get by installing perf or linux-perf or linux-tools-common.

To get usable results you need to build Minetest with debug symbols (-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo or -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug).

Run the client (or server) like this and do whatever you wanted to test:

perf record -z --call-graph dwarf -- ./bin/minetest

This will leave a file called "perf.data".

You can open this file with perf built-in tools but much more interesting is the visualization using a GUI tool: Hotspot. It will give you flamegraphs, per-thread, per-function views and much more.

Remote Profiling

Attach perf to your running server, press ^C to stop:

perf record -z --call-graph dwarf -F 400 -p "$(pidof minetestserver)"

Collect a copy of the required libraries/executables:

perf buildid-list | grep -Eo '/[^ ]+(minetestserver|\.so)[^ ]*$' | \
	tar -cvahf debug.tgz --files-from=- --ignore-failed-read

Give both files to the developer and also provide:

Linux distribution and version
commit the source was built from and/or modified source code (if applicable)

Hotspot will resolve symbols correctly when pointing the sysroot option at the collected libs.

Profiling with Tracy

Tracy is

A real time, nanosecond resolution, remote telemetry, hybrid frame and sampling profiler for games and other applications.

It allows one to annotate important functions and generate traces, where one can see when each individual function call happened, and how long it took.

Tracy can also record when frames, e.g. server step, start and end, and inspect frames that took longer than usual. Minetest already contains annotations for its frames.

Installing

Tracy consists of a client (Minetest) and a server (the gui).

Install the server, e.g. using your package manager.

Building

Build Minetest with -DDBUILD_WITH_TRACY=1, this will fetch Tracy for building the Tracy client. And use FETCH_TRACY_GIT_TAG to get a version matching your Tracy server, e.g. -DFETCH_TRACY_GIT_TAG=v0.11.0 if it's 0.11.0.

To actually use Tracy, you also have to enable it with Tracy's build options:

-DTRACY_ENABLE=1 -DTRACY_ONLY_LOCALHOST=1

See Tracy's documentation for more build options.

Using in C++

Start the Tracy server and Minetest. You should see Minetest in the menu.

To actually get useful traces, you have to annotate functions with ZoneScoped macros and recompile. Please refer to Tracy's official documentation.

Using in Lua

Tracy also supports Lua. If built with Tracy, Minetest loads its API in the global tracy table. See Tracy's official documentation for more information.

Note: The whole Tracy Lua API is accessible to all mods. And we don't check if it is or becomes insecure. Run untrusted mods at your own risk.

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