Profiling

Using wallClockProfiler

This profiler is a wrapper around GDB that samples the main thread by getting backtraces and presents its statistics based on the wall clock - thus including the time spent waiting for I/O.

Keep in mind that the profiled program is paused while GDB gets a backtrace, so don't use very high sampling rates. Also keep an eye on GDB's CPU usage.

Get the software

In the same parent directory as nim-beacon-chain:

$ ls
nim-beacon-chain
$ git clone https://github.com/jasonrohrer/wallClockProfiler.git
$ cd wallClockProfiler
$ g++ $CXXFLAGS -o wallClockProfiler wallClockProfiler.cpp
$ cd ..

Flame graph support is in a PR that's not expected to be merged any time soon by upstream:

$ git clone https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/FlameGraph.git
$ cd FlameGraph
$ git checkout wallClockProfiler
$ cd ..

Profile beacon_node

Start a Medalla node and get the beacon_node PID:

$ cd nim-beacon-chain
$ make medalla

# wait until beacon_node starts running, then run from another terminal tab:
$ ps -e -o pid,command | grep beacon_node

Assuming the PID you got is 1234, run the profiler for 5 minutes, at 19 samples per second:

$ ../wallClockProfiler/wallClockProfiler 19 build/beacon_node 1234 300 > profile_19_300.txt

# make the flame graph
$ ../FlameGraph/stackcollapse-wcp.pl profile_19_300.txt > profile_19_300_collapsed.txt
$ ../FlameGraph/flamegraph.pl profile_19_300_collapsed.txt > profile_19_300.svg

Now you can open "profile_19_300.svg" in a browser and click on individual functions to zoom in.

Using prof (also a wall-clock-based profile)

perf record --call-graph dwarf,16000 -e task-clock -p $(pidof beacon_node)
perf script > out.perf
../FlameGraph/stackcollapse-perf.pl out.perf > perf_collapsed.txt
../FlameGraph/flamegraph.pl perf_collapsed.txt > perf.svg

See this for a way to get file names and line numbers: https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph/issues/205#issuecomment-698008393