Profiling

Enabling Profile Mode

Profile mode does several things (depending on platform)

• Disables vsync
• Disables frame limiting
• Enables a profiler (Dreamcast only)

Profiling mode can be enabled a number of ways

• You can set the SIMULANT_PROFILE environment variable to 1
• You can set AppConfig::development::force_profiling to true
• You can compile Simulant with -DSIMULANT_PROFILE (passed as an argument to CMake normally)

The Dreamcast Profiler

The Dreamcast profiler is a built-in sampling profiler that runs in a background thread. When the Simulant application is run via dcload and profiling is enabled, a file will be generated at /pc/gmon.out, you'll need to pass the -c argument to dcload to get this to work (and possibly run under sudo)

The generated file can be passed to gprof to generate a flat profile. Remember that by default Dreamcast .elfs have their debugging symbols stripped and moved to a .debug extension so you'll need to use the .debug file, like so:

sh-elf-gprof -b -p samples/nehe02.elf.debug gmon.out

Note: if you don't use the sh-elf-gprof executable, none of the function name mangling will be performed correctly