Para-byond-tracy

Para-byond-tracy glues together a byond server the tracy profiler allowing you to analyze and visualize proc calls. This differs from the standard byond-tracy by the nature of it writing to flatfiles inside data/profiler/. While these files can be up to 30 gigabytes in size, they allow the RAM usage of DreamDaemon to remain very low at runtime, which is useful for profiling entire rounds (A profile from a full round needs >48GB of RAM just to view, let alone save at runtime).

Note that the files generated cannot be loaded straight into tracy. You must use replay.py to load the .utracy file and stream "it over the network" (localhost) into capture.exe as part of Tracy. You can stream straight into Tracy.exe, but this is not advised due to performance overhead.

The above script requires the lz4 library with the stream addon. The instructions for that are out of scope of this guide.

Update 2023-12-29: You can now use https://github.com/AffectedArc07/ParaTracyReplay to stream the files much faster than the python script.

Update 2024-04-18: You can now use https://github.com/Dimach/rtracy to stream the files even faster than the C# code, as well as split traces and other cool things.

A massive thanks to mafemergency for even making this possible. The below readme is adapted from the original repo (branch: stream-to-file) https://github.com/mafemergency/byond-tracy/

supported byond versions

windows	linux
516.1663	516.1664
516.1664	516.1663
516.1662	516.1662
516.1661	516.1661
516.1660	516.1660
516.1659	516.1659
516.1658	516.1658
516.1657	516.1657
516.1656	516.1656
516.1655	516.1655
516.1654	N/A
516.1653	516.1653
516.1652	516.1652
516.1651	516.1651
516.1650	516.1650
516.1649	516.1649
516.1648	516.1648
515.*	515.*
514.*	514.*

supported tracy versions

None built in, you need to reply these.

usage

simply call init from prof.dll to begin writing to a file inside data/profiler

init will return the filename it writes to upon success - the filename will always start with .

// returns a string filename whenever
/proc/prof_init()
    var/lib

    switch(world.system_type)
        if(MS_WINDOWS) lib = "prof.dll"
        if(UNIX) lib = "libprof.so"
        else CRASH("unsupported platform")

    var/init = call_ext(lib, "init")()
    if(length(init) != 0 && init[1] == ".") // if first character is ., then it returned the output filename
        return init
    else if("0" != init)
        CRASH("[lib] init error: [init]")

/world/New()
    var/utracy_filename = prof_init()
    . = ..()

building

no build system included, simply invoke your preferred c11 compiler. examples:

(AA recommended: If you have the MSVC++ buildchain, open x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022 and then cd to this repo. cl should be on your path inside of that CLI environment) (Absolucy recommended: just use clang on windows, tbh)

cl.exe /nologo /std:c11 /O2 /LD /DNDEBUG prof.c ws2_32.lib /Fe:prof.dll /experimental:c11atomics

clang.exe -std=c11 -m32 -shared -Ofast3 -DNDEBUG -fuse-ld=lld-link prof.c -lws2_32 -o prof.dll

gcc -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -std=c11 -m32 -shared -fPIC -Ofast -s -DNDEBUG prof.c -pthread -o libprof.so

remarks

byond-tracy is in its infancy and is not production ready for live servers.