[Bf-committers] Blender performance measuring instrumentation improvement proposal

[Martijn Berger]

Hi Sergey,

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx at gmail.com>
wrote:

> It doesn't seem to be so much an improvement to be honest, such a test will
> be more or less about nothing. It shouldn't be full testing, it should be
> per-area time measuring. For example, we could speedup viewport opengl
> display but accidentally slowdown dependency graph and having just an
> aggregated number will tell you simply nothing.
>

Yes this could be an issue. But I still think it is also useful to measure
the whole application performance.

>
> it is also important to setup a strictly controlled environment for such
> tests if we want the numbers to mean anything. Otherwise we'll end up with
> folks reporting speed regressions in blender while it might be just new
> antivirus application being installed on their desktop.
>

This argument could be made about all possible ways to do this. The numbers
produced by some random user and posted on a forum somewhere have little
meaning always no matter how you look at it.


> Surely if we'll have such an environment setup then it'll be handy, but the
> proposal for it needs much more work i'm afraid.
>


What exactly you think is difficult?
Unlocking the max fps or making interface frames map to animation frames on
a 1 to 1 basis ?
It could maybe help if you could provide additional technical oriented
feedback to that?



> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Martijn Berger <martijn.berger at gmail.com
> >
> wrote:
>
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> >
> > Blender is evolving at a rather nice pace currently but I feel we could
> use
> > better measurements to guide its the performance aspect of this a bit
> > better.
> >
> > Some 3d games (like quake) have a feature called “timedemo” this
> basically
> > runs the game as fast as the hardware will let it run. I tried doing
> > something similar in blender and found a number of little things that
> maybe
> > could be tweaked to make this possible.
> >
> > Overview of how this would work:
> >
> > The user runs the command:
> >
> > “blender --factory-startup --python-expr="import bpy;
> > bpy.ops.debug_timer(type='FULLTEST', report=True); sys.exit(0);"
> > demo_scene.blend”
> >
> > The following happens:
> >
> >
> >    1.
> >
> >    Blender starts and loads demo_scene.blend
> >    2.
> >
> >    Blender executes the python expression passed to it
> >    3.
> >
> >    debug_timer() is invoked:
> >    1.
> >
> >       Move animation counter to the start of the range
> >       2.
> >
> >       unlock max fps ( if vsync is disabled this allows very high
> >       framerates)
> >       3.
> >
> >       Gets an accurate time measurement
> >       4.
> >
> >       Run the animation and render 1 OpenGL frame per frame of animation
> >       5.
> >
> >       At the end of the range, capture time again
> >       6.
> >
> >       Print this time ( to stdout ?)
> >       4.
> >
> >    sys.exit(0), exit blender
> >
> >
> > What we need for this to work:
> >
> >
> >    1.
> >
> >    implement bpy.ops.debug_timer()
> >    2.
> >
> >    Allow higher then 120 fps for animation playback
> >    3.
> >
> >    Not sure, if we allow gl frames to be locked to blender animation
> frames
> >    4. (optional) implement ‘python-expr’ command line argument
> >
> >
> >
> > I might have missed stuff but the purpose of this message is to inform
> and
> > discus the possibility as well as map out the bits and pieces that need
> to
> > be done in order to get this functionality.
> >
> > I think something like this could also be instrumental in achieving high
> > performance in the viewport project.
> >
> >
> > Martijn
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bf-committers mailing list
> > Bf-committers at blender.org
> > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
> >
>
>
>
> --
> With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
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