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Runtime Profiling with Tracy

Tracy is a real-time profiler using a client/server model. It is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) and support GPU (OpenGL, Vulkan, etc.). This page explains how to use Tracy with Lagrange.

Enabling The Tracy Client

Tracy uses a client-server model to profile applications. This means we need to inject the Tracy client (a single .cpp file) into our application to enable profiling. To enable the Tracy client with Lagrange, simply enable the CMake option LAGRANGE_WITH_TRACY in your CMake setup.

Compile Options

On macOs and Linux, do not forget to compile your application with -g, -fno-omit-frame-pointer, and -rdynamic (see tracy manual for explanations). When using LAGRANGE_WITH_TRACY=ON, those options will be automatically enabled by the Lagrange CMake.

Instrumenting Your Code

The next step will be to instrument your code. In short:

  1. Include <Tracy.hpp> in every file you are interested in profiling.
  2. Add the macro FrameMark at the end of each frame loop.
  3. Add the macro ZoneScoped as the first line of your function definitions to include them in the profile.

Convenience Macros

Since Tracy is an optional dependency in Lagrange, we provide a convenience header to include Tracy without having to test the TRACY_ENABLE macro:

#include <lagrange/utils/tracy.h>

This header provides the following alias macros for Tracy:

  • LAGRANGE_ZONE_SCOPED for ZoneScoped
  • LAGRANGE_FRAME_MARK for FrameMark

When Tracy is disabled (LAGRANGE_WITH_TRACY=OFF in CMake), these macros will expand to a no-op.

Running The Tracy Profiler

Make sure to compile the profiler (server) using the same version of Tracy as in Lagrange. The easiest way to do so is to build from the <build>/_deps/tracy-src. This folder is downloaded by CMake when building Lagrange with LAGRANGE_WITH_TRACY=ON.

Windows

  1. Download the pre-built binaries corresponding to the version of Tracy used in Lagrange (see cmake/recipes/external/tracy.cmake).
  2. Run the Tracy executable and your program.
  3. Click "Connect" in the Tracy profiler.

macOS

  1. Install prerequisites using homebrew 
    brew install freetype capstone gtk glfw
  2. Build the profiler (server): 
    cd <build>/_deps/tracy-src/profiler/build/unix
make release -j8
  3. Run the profiler: 
    ./Tracy-release
  4. Run your program, and click "Connect" in the Tracy profiler.