Surface Evolver Documentation

Surface Evolver Execution Time Profiling

Coarse Profiling

Coarse timing with resolution of 0,01 second or so can be done with Evolver's clock variable. For example, to time iterations I typically do


   Enter command: quiet; start := clock; g 100; print start-clock; quiet off

which will print out the elapsed time in seconds. I do quiet here to suppress output to the screen, which can slow down things considerably.

Fine Profiling

Nanosecond resolution can be done with Evolver's cpu_counter variable.

Expression Evaluation Profiling

On systems where Evolver has cpu_counter available and Evolver has been compiled with the manifest constant PROF_EVALS defined, the expression evaluator inside Evolver keeps track of the clock cycles elapsed during each expression evaluation. These expressions include procedures, functions, constraint and boundary formulas, content integrands, energy integrands, quantity integrands, etc; everything that prints out as code in a dump file. The print profiling command will print the accumulated CPU cycles so far for each type of expression. The times are inclusive of any child functions or procedures. An example, from mound.fe after running "gogo":

Enter command: print profiling
Inclusive profiling counts:
                      Name            CPU Cycles
                              re           1,952,792
                            gogo         125,201,889
                           gogo2                   0
                           gogo3                   0
                           gogo4                   0
                           gogo5                   0

Constraint expressions
                    Constraint  Formula Cycles   Energy Cycles  Content Cycles
                             1         877,047       2,337,727               0

Note that hard-coded evaluations of area, volume, etc. do not show up here, except for their effect on overall elapsed time.

The command reset_profiling will set all the cycle values back to 0.

Execution sampling

Of course, if you are compiling Evolver yourself, you can use any type of profiling you would ordinarily use on a C program. i leave you to your own devices on this.