Building with support for profiling

stack build

Although stack has support for building with profiling 1, for some reason it is currently unable to build cardano-sl-update with profiling enabled.

stack build --profile cardano-wallet:unit

will result in

    ByteCodeLink.lookupCE
    During interactive linking, GHCi couldn't find the following symbol:
      textzm1zi2zi2zi2zm9UQZZjEJZZQFSGMffj1ZZ5g00_DataziText_zdfMonoidTextzuzdczlzg_closure
    This may be due to you not asking GHCi to load extra object files,
    archives or DLLs needed by your current session.  Restart GHCi, specifying
    the missing library using the -L/path/to/object/dir and -lmissinglibname
    flags, or simply by naming the relevant files on the GHCi command line.
    Alternatively, this link failure might indicate a bug in GHCi.
    If you suspect the latter, please send a bug report to:
      [email protected]

This seems to be related to a ghc bug, but I can’t figure out exactly why this is going wrong because both nix and cabal are able to build it just fine. The ghc ticket isn’t very clear about this either. I even patched stack to not pass -fprof-auto and -fprof-cafs, but it didn’t make a difference, nor did forcing stack to use my system ghc.

nix-build

nix-build can be used to obtain a profiling build

nix-build -A cardano-wallet --arg enableProfiling true

Note however that this builds and runs the tests for a lot of dependencies. To address this, may wish to change the definition of mkDerivation in default.nix to

mkDerivation = args: super.mkDerivation (args // {
    enableLibraryProfiling    = enableProfiling;
    enableExecutableProfiling = enableProfiling;
    doCheck                   = args.pname == "cardano-wallet";
  }

to only build and run the tests for the specified package (it does not seem to be possible to build but not run them).

TODO: The above should work but doesn’t. Not totally sure why. Need to ask somebody familiar with the nix infrastructure.

cabal new-build

cabal new-build also has built-in support for profiling 3. Provided that a cabal.project has been created, we can specify profiling options like this:

package wallet
  profiling-detail: toplevel-functions

It also seems to be necessary to update to unix-time-0.3.8 rather than unix-time-0.3.7 as the latter results in a compile time failure about missing config.h.

Then:

cabal new-build --enable-profiling cardano-wallet:unit

Running

Depending on the build method, the executable will have been left in a different location. To run the executable with profiling enabled, run

path/to/executable +RTS -p -RTS

this will leave a .prof file in the current directory with the profiling results. A useful package for visualizing a timing profile is Profiteur.

To obtain a heap profile, use one of the -h RTS options, for example

path/to/executable +RTS -hy -RTS

for a heap profile by type. This will leave a .hp file in the current directory. This can be converted to a .ps file using hp2ps (which comes bundled with ghc):

hp2ps -c cardano-wallet-unit.hp

or to an .svg file using hp2pretty

hp2pretty cardano-wallet-unit.hp

For more RTS options, run

path/to/executable +RTS -? -RTS

References