Godot

Appearance

Using C++ profilers ​

To optimize Godot's performance, you need to know what to optimize first. To this end, profilers are useful tools.

INFO

There is a The Profiler in the editor, but using a C++ profiler may be useful in cases where the GDScript profiler is not accurate enough or is missing information due to bugs in the profiler.

There are two main types of profilers: sampling profilers and tracing profilers.

Sampling profilers periodically interrupt the running program and take a "sample", which records which functions are running. Using this information, the profiler estimates which functions the program spent the most time in.

Tracing profilers work by recording application-specific events (such as the start and end of a single frame), producing a log called a "trace". The profiler can use the trace to produce a graph showing an accurate high-level timeline of what happened. However, any code that is not explicitly instrumented will not appear in a tracing profiler's timeline!

Godot supports both sampling profilers and tracing profilers, and already includes the logging code for common Godot events for use with a tracing profiler!

Different problems may be easier to debug with one kind of profiler over the other, but it's difficult to provide a set of rules for which to use. Give both a try, and see what you can learn from them!

Sampling profilers ​

We recommend the following sampling profilers:

These profilers may not be the most powerful or flexible options, but their standalone operation and limited feature set tends to make them easier to use.

Setting up Godot ​

To get useful profiling information, it is absolutely required to use a Godot build that includes debugging symbols. Official binaries do not include debugging symbols, since these would make the download size significantly larger.

To get profiling data that best matches the production environment (but with debugging symbols), you should compile binaries with the production=yes debug_symbols=yes SCons options.

It is possible to run a profiler on less optimized builds (e.g. target=template_debug without LTO), but results will naturally be less representative of real world conditions.

WARNING

Do not strip debugging symbols on the binaries using the strip command after compiling the binaries. Otherwise, you will no longer get useful profiling information when running a profiler.

Benchmarking startup/shutdown times ​

If you're looking into optimizing Godot's startup/shutdown performance, you can tell the profiler to use the --quit command line option on the Godot binary. This will exit Godot just after it's done starting. The --quit option works with --editor, --project-manager, and --path <path to project directory> (which runs a project directly).

INFO

See Command line tutorial for more command line arguments supported by Godot.

Tracing profilers ​

Godot currently supports three tracing profilers:

In order to use either of them, you'll need to build the engine from source. If you've never done this before, please read Building from source for the platform you want to profile on. You'll need to perform the same steps here, but with some additional arguments for scons.