Interpreting the visual profiler information

[benjames171]

Is there any documentation on how to interpret the visual profiler output?

My Android builds are experiencing intermittent but severe slowdown (maybe 25% speed) and I’m looking for clues. It seems strange that the game starts perfectly fine but after a minute slows right down then a few seconds later speeds back up again.

[sicher]

It might be that you create a lot of garbage that needs to be collected during the slowdown. Either way, the profiler shows various scopes and how much time is spent in them (milliseconds and # of calls). The bars on the right are color coded to correspond to scope colors. At the bottom you have resource counters.

The web profiler is easier to work with since it allows you to sample data at any point and study that data without interruption. In your case you can wait for a slowdown, sample data and then check what takes time.

See http://www.defold.com/manuals/debugging/#_web_profiler

[benjames171]

Thank you - seems I’m rendering too much stuff.

A further off-topic question - if I set the alpha of a gui object to 0, does it still get sent to be rendered?

[sicher]

Yes, it will be sent to be rendered. If you don’t set a texture, it will break the batch so make sure to set a texture accordingly. Check out

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and

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[britzl]

if I set the alpha of a gui object to 0, does it still get sent to be rendered?

It’s better to use gui.set_enabled(node, false) since “Disabled nodes are not rendered and animations acting on them are not evaluated.”