Viladoman
commented
2 years ago Hi! Thanks for all the info and for using the extension.
I don't know how your game solution and projects are organized, but there is already a way to build/rebuild and profile a single project, using the context menu on the project in the solution explorer.
Hopefully this can help with your iteration times. If this is not good enough I would like to learn more about it.
I am not familiar with AutoSDK, but I guess eventually it will invoke a C++ compiler ( MSVC, Clang, GCC... ). If it ends up calling MSVC then your should have no problem capturing the events as they compile. The recorder will capture anything that MSCV builds in the machine. This means that it doesn't matter who invokes the compiler, the recorder will capture it.
Still you should consider the following:
- Building different solutions while profiling will end up with the recorder capturing both instances and generating a false report.
- Being a helper in a distributed build system can pollute your profile results as the files that your machine is compiling for someone else will be captured by the recorder, generating a false report.
- At the same time any files that are sent to another machine to be built externally on a distributed system won't appear on the recording.
In the case of Clang you might need to add the -ftime-trace to the compiler invocation so that it generates the traces. This is more robust to distributed builds because each translation unit creates its own trace data, but you need to make sure the trace information files ( .obj.json ) are brought back from the remote machines.
For more detailed information on how the extraction works you can check the wiki page.
Regarding Unity builds, it should still give you the results and the expensive headers. Although removing some dependencies might have no impact to the build times as that dependency will be then added by some other file in the same unity unit. I totally agree that you can get better insights by decomposing the unity files into single translation units.
Sadly, I am not super familiar with Unreal, but we can definitely create a wiki page with best practices.
rlabrecque
Hey there, I'm impressed with how well this works with Unreal out of the box! That being said there's a few parts that could be improved.
I think Unreal can output various forms of compilation databases, which may be interesting to replay the exact same commands with the exact same compilers Unreal is using.
I think some documentation on these (or other best practices on using CompileScore with Unreal) would probably satisfy me. Worst case at least having a ticket open with some of these gotcha's is hopefully enough for anyone else wanting to try this out 👍
Thanks for making this!