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The new version of the DigitalRune Helper Library (DigitalRune.dll, which is part of DigitalRune Physics Bundle) has not 1 but 2 profiler classes. The “simple profiler” class was introduced in the previous blog post. In this blog post, we talk about the second profiler, which is a “hierarchical profiler”. It was inspired by the article Real-Time Hierarchical Profiling (Game Programming Gems 3).

Do we really need another profiler class? – Yes, really! This class has slightly different goals. The main goal is to measure the timing of nested method calls. This is extremely helpful in many applications – in particular if you need to optimize your game loop. An important difference between the simple profiler and the hierarchical profiler is that the hierarchical profiler does not work across multiple threads. That’s why we still need the simple profiler. The simple profiler can be used to collect values and to profile code in multi-threaded scenarios.

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Here is a short description of a new Profiler class that comes with the new release of the DigitalRune Helper Library (DigitalRune.dll, which is part of DigitalRune Physics Bundle).

Simple Profiler Features

The Profiler class provides following features:

• Measure code execution time.
• Collect interesting values, like “How many collisions happened in this frame?”, “How many iterations did this algorithm make?”, etc.
• Compute minimum, average and maximum values.
• Thread-safety.
• Do not influence performance in release builds – only in profiling builds of the game.

Overview

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