[gst-devel] Naming threads ? Other performance debugging helpers ?

[Stefan Kost]

Florent schrieb:
> Hello Stefan,
> 
>> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580505
>>
>> I'd like to have this too, but I don't think it can be done in a crossplatform,
>> non hackish way.
>> What you could do is to add some thread-id name association to gstreamer. The
>> you could write gdb extension to query it? Or the logging could print the name
>> as well. Where would you need the name?
> 
> Indeed, naming threads is a non-standard feature. The elements which
> spawn a thread could report their new PID in the gst logs, and/or emit
> a gst message ("new-thread", with {"pid", "gst_element_name"} as
> contents). This would be cross-platform, right ?
> 
>> As my time permits I hack on gst-tracelib [1]. One plan is to intergrate the
>> graphing (which is done by gnuplot) into gst-debug-viewer [2]. The later is
>> written in python. Would be cool if you would consider helping on that one.
> 
> I quickly tried them, this is awesome work :) I agree, integrating
> plotting into gst-debug-viewer would be great. However, it also means
> that log generation (and dynamic linking) should be unified, so that
> both gstreamer log and performance logs are generated in the same step
> ? As for integrating the plots, some kind of image viewer could do the
> trick, right (scrollable pane with png/svg inside)?

Yep, you need to run tracelib and generate a debug log at the same time. In the
viewer we would draw the curves ourself, so that we can zoom. I spent too much
with gnuplot already.
> 
> Sadly, performance tracing doesn't work with python-based gstreamer
> apps... Any idea how to let python also use them ?

It should work with python apps too, its just hooking into the underlying
gstreamer. What happens?

> 
> My question was however more related to quick/real time performance
> debugging. I ended up coding http://code.google.com/p/gst-viewperf/,
> which uses queue filling states to graphically point out performance
> starvations. This is merely a prototype, but it works and helped me
> already.

Looks neat. So one would need to insert a queue after each element? You are
aware that this modifies the runtime behaviour heavily. Anyway we have the same
goals - somehow shing graphically bottlenecks.

> I am planning on integrating python-gtop (not before Ubuntu
> 9.04 though), which will enable the use of libgtop (aka
> gnome-system-monitor's lib) so that system performance plotting would
> be integrable (cpu, mem, disk, network) in python apps. If onlt i
> could get the gst element's spawned PIDs, i could also embed the
> plugin-related CPU usage.

I was also thinking of a plugin api for tracelib to allow plugging more sensors,
e.g. a dsp-cpu-load sensor.

> 
> In this scope, i am asking for help regarding getting the graph
> structure of a pipeline: how can i get a graph representation of the
> pipeline ? Here, i merely parse the pipeline description... Works for
> linearly-defined pipelines, but not in all cases.

Have you looked at gstreamer/gst/debugutils.c &
GST_DEBUG_BIN_TO_DOT_FILE? This is dumping the current pipeline as a dot file
and one can render that via graphviz.

One idea would be to use the graphviz api directly to dynamically draw the
pipelines. Unfortunately the docs are in doxygen - good luck with finding where
to start :/
http://www.graphviz.org/pub/graphviz/development/doxygen/html/index.html
I also found
http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/cgraph.3.pdf
http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/libguide.pdf

now you would need python bindings :/
> 
> PS: sorry for the delay, i don't have much time for spare projects...

I know. mee too :/

Stefan

> 
> Florent
> 
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