Re: profiling GJS/Clutter.Timeline vs Mainloop.timeout_add

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Amy C <mathematical coffee gmail com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have an extension that populates the screen with little animated
> toons. The animation is frame-driven, i.e. for each frame, every toon
> determines where they will move next and changes their pixmap slightly
> to give the appearance of animation.
>
> Now that the extension is mostly working, I'm trying to make it more efficient.
> At the moment I drive the animation by using
>
>    Mainloop.timeout_add(delay_between_frames, Lang.bind(this, this.frame))
>
> where this.frame is the code that advances all the toons one step.
>
> I notice that this is sometimes laggy (I can't really reproduce it
> though) - the type where you move your cursor across the screen and
> can see it pausing every frame before it continues on.
>
> Should I use a Clutter.Timeline for this instead? I like
> Mainloop.timeout_add because it allows me to specify the time between
> frames and suits a frame-driven animation, whereas a Clutter.Timeline
> seems more suited to an animation where you just want it to transition
> from state A to state B in x milliseconds, however many frames happen
> to fit in that.

The point of frame-driven animation is that you don't care about the
time between frames. You can use a repaint func
(Clutter.threads_add_repaint_func IIRC), or a timeline with a very
long duration to get a function called on a frame tick.

> Continuing on from that, is there some tool by which I can profile GJS
> code? I know there are plenty for JS code but I'm not sure how to
> write my code to run standalone what with the various imports
> (.gi.{heaps| & .lang, .mainloop), or even if that is possible.

It's not the JS code that's slowing you down. While Clutter uses the
GLib Mainloop, it has specialized needs, so a Mainloop-style approach
won't really work.

> cheers!
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-- 
  Jasper