Real applications that control their Drawable externally to Cairo are
'disadvantaged' by cairo-perf-trace when it creates a similar surface
for each new instance of the same Drawable. The difficulty in
maintaining one perf surface for every application surface is that the
traces do not track lifetimes for the application surfaces, so we would
just accumulate stale surfaces. The surface cache takes a different
approach and returns the same surface for each active Drawable, and
maintains a hold-over of the MRU 16 surfaces. This achieves 60-80% hit
rate with firefox, which is probably as good as can be expected.
Obviously for double-buffered applications we only every draw to freshly
created surfaces (and Gtk+ bypasses cairo to do the final copy -- the
ideal application would just use a push-group for double buffering, in
which case we would capture and replay the entire expose event).
To enable use of the surface cache whilst replaying use -c:
./cairo-perf-trace -c firefox-talos-gfx
Hook into the scanner to write out binary version of the tokenized
objects -- note we bind executable names (i.e. check to see if is an
operator and substitute the name with an operator -- this breaks
overloading of operators by scripts).
By converting scripts to a binary form, they are more compact and
execute faster:
firefox-world-map.trace 526850146 bytes
bound.trace 275187755 bytes
[ # ] backend test min(s) median(s) stddev. count
[ 0] null bound 34.481 34.741 0.68% 3/3
[ 1] null firefox-world-map 89.635 89.716 0.19% 3/3
[ 0] drm bound 79.304 79.350 0.61% 3/3
[ 1] drm firefox-world-map 135.380 135.475 0.58% 3/3
[ 0] image bound 95.819 96.258 2.85% 3/3
[ 1] image firefox-world-map 156.889 156.935 1.36% 3/3
[ 0] xlib bound 539.130 550.220 1.40% 3/3
[ 1] xlib firefox-world-map 596.244 613.487 1.74% 3/3
This trace has a lot of complex paths and the use of binary floating point
reduces the file size by about 50%, with a commensurate reduction in scan
time and significant reduction in operator lookup overhead. Note that this
test is still IO/CPU bound on my i915 with its pitifully slow flash...
When using fonts circular references are established between the holdover
font caches and the interpreter which need manual intervention via
cairo_script_interpreter_finish() to break.
Add a CairoScript interpreter library and use it to replay the test output
for the CairoScript backend. The library is also used by the currently
standalone Sphinx debugger [git://anongit.freedesktop.org/~ickle/sphinx].
The syntax/operator semantics are not yet finalized, but are expected to
mature before the next stable release.
