love.diary - a basic profiling library

[hughes]

Here is a little library that will help you determine where your program is slowing down.

Usage:
At some point, start a timer:

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Diary.start("Main Loop")

Then stop it somewhere:

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Diary.stop("Main Loop")

You can add a timer as a child of another timer

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Diary.stop("Draw call", "Main Loop") -- this timer is a child of the Main Loop timer

You can auto-attach entries by calling

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Diary.autoAttach("Name of default timer")

Then reset the default:

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Diary.autoAttach()

You can add as many levels of children as you want. Try not to make infinite loops.

Get the status of the diary with

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Diary.toStr()

This can be printed with

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love.graphics.print(Diary.toStr(), x,y)

or simply with

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print(Diary.toStr())

Example output:

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[+] Main Loop: 49.8 ms
 |  [+] Update: 51.08 ms
 |   |  [+] Reticulating Splines: 51.08 ms
 |   |   |  Subtask a: 33.07 ms
 |   |   |  Subtask b: 17.99 ms
 |  [+] Draw: 6.98 ms
 |   |  Printing Text: 1.27 ms
 |   |  Lubricating freewheel unit: 5.69 ms
A top-level entry: 5.99 ms

See attached library and sample love file. Won't work across threads. Tested only in 0.8.0.

Please try it out and tell me how it can be made better! Try to break it!

[TechnoCat]

Have it output to a file the average times after a set number of iterations or something.

[Jasoco]

This looks like it could be useful in conjunction with my own Debugging library.

[vrld]

Looks nice, especially the output. But the lib should also show the average execution time and the number of calls to effectively profile stuff. Also, what is the benefit over using luaprofiler?

[hughes]

what is the benefit over using luaprofiler?

Um - i guess the only benefit is that for some reason I thought it was easier to write my own than to google if something like that already existed. Damn.

Nothing to see here folks...

[Ellohir]

Good job anyway

[rude]

Also, what is the benefit over using luaprofiler?

love.diary has a cooler name, and by LÖVE-logic, is therefore cooler.

If cool counts as a benefit. (Hint: it does)