README.md

Rust Compiler Performance Benchmarking and Profiling

Hardware and software details of the machine that executes the CI details can be found here. A glossary of relevant terms can be found here.

The benchmarks

Compile time benchmarks are described in the README file in the collector/compile-benchmarks directory.

Runtime benchmarks are described in the README file in the collector/runtime-benchmarks directory.

How to build

Before doing anything else, you should build collector (for running the benchmarks) and site (for viewing the results):

cargo +nightly build --release

Other steps

You may need to install OpenSSL libraries so that the openssl-sys crate used by several benchmarks will compile. On Ubuntu Linux 18.10 do the following:

sudo apt install libssl1.0-dev

Without this, you will likely get the following build panic on some benchmarks:

This crate is only compatible with OpenSSL 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and 1.1.0, or LibreSSL
2.5 and 2.6.0, but a different version of OpenSSL was found. The build is now
aborting due to this version mismatch.

Benchmarking

This section is about benchmarking rustc, i.e. measuring its performance on the standard benchmark suite. The most likely reason for doing this is to evaluate the performance effect of a change you've made to rustc. It's also done regularly by the benchmark server.

How to benchmark a change using the benchmark server

An easy (but slow) way to benchmark the performance effect of a change is to request a run on the benchmark server for a specific PR.

First, create a PR with the changes.

After that, you need try privileges, or the assistance of someone with try privileges. Ask in #t-compiler/help on Zulip and/or ping @simulacrum as a starting point.

There are two ways for that person to do a benchmark run.

• The easier way: they enter @bors try @rust-timer queue as a comment in the PR. This queues a try build and a benchmarking run. Several hours later, the results will be available at the given URL.
• The harder way: they must first enter @bors try to trigger a try build. Once that completes, they must enter @rust-timer build $MERGE, where $MERGE is the full 40 character merge revision ID from the try build.

Various measurements are available: instructions (the default), cycles, wall time, peak RSS memory, etc. There is some non-determinism and natural variation in the measurements. Instructions is the default because it has the least variation. Benchmarks that are known to have high instructions variance are marked with a '?' in the compare page.

How to benchmark a change on your own machine

The following command runs the compile benchmark suite (which measures how long does it take to compile various crates with rustc) using a local rustc:

./target/release/collector bench_local <RUSTC>

It will benchmark the entire suite and put the results in a SQLite database file called results.db. The full benchmark suite takes hours to run, but the time can be reduced greatly by using the options below to reduce the number of benchmarks, profiles, or scenarios. Progress output is printed to stderr.

The following arguments are mandatory.

• <RUSTC>: a path (relative or absolute) to a rustc executable that will be benchmarked. The value is likely to be something like $RUST/build/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/stage1/bin/rustc, where $RUST is a path (relative or absolute) to a rust repository. You can use either a stage 1 or a stage 2 compiler, but if you're comparing two versions you should choose consistently. Alternatively, it can be a +-prefixed toolchain specifier such as +nightly or +f7bb8e3677ba4277914e85a3060e5d69151aed44 in which case rustup will be used to obtain the toolchain, downloading it if necessary. The commit SHA of the toolchain does not need to be in the rustc master branch, it can be e.g. the result of a try CI run.

  If you want to specify a toolchain with a commit SHA, you will need to have rustup-toolchain-install-master installed.

The identifier under which the results will be put into the database varies.

• If the --id option is specified, that identifer will be used.
• Otherwise, if rustc is specified via a path, Id will be used.
• Otherwise, rustc is specified via a +-prefixed toolchain specifier, and the toolchain name will be used.

Benchmarking options

The following options alter the behaviour of the bench_local subcommand.

• --bench-rustc: there is a special rustc benchmark that involves downloading a recent Rust compiler and measuring the time taken to compile it. This benchmark works very differently to all the other benchmarks. For example, --profiles and --scenarios don't affect it, and the given ID is used as the rust-lang/rust ref (falling back to HEAD if the ID is not a valid ref). It is for advanced and CI use only. This option enables it.
• --cargo <CARGO>: a path (relative or absolute) to a Cargo executable that will be used to build the benchmarks. By default, the nightly Cargo installed by rustup will be used. This is usually fine, though in rare cases it may cause local results to not exactly match production results, because Cargo sometimes begins passing (or stops passing) various flags to rustc.
• --cargo-config <CONFIG>: a Cargo configuration value or a path to a Cargo configuration file. This flag can be specified multiple times, and will be passed to the Cargo executable as the value of the flag --config.
• --db <DATABASE>: a path (relative or absolute) to a sqlite database file in which the timing data will be placed. It will be created if it does not already exist. The default is results.db. Alternatively, the collector supports postgres as a backend and the URL can be specified (beginning with postgres://), but this is unlikely to be useful for local collection.
• --exclude <EXCLUDE>: this is used to run a subset of the benchmarks. The argument is a comma-separated list of benchmark prefixes. When this option is specified, a benchmark is excluded from the run if its name matches one of the given prefixes.
• --exclude-suffix <EXCLUDE>: this is used to run a subset of the benchmarks. The argument is a comma-separated list of benchmark suffixes. When this option is specified, a benchmark is excluded from the run if its name matches one of the given suffixes. This can be useful to quickly exclude the benchmarks dedicated to artifact sizes (ending with -tiny).
• --id <ID> the identifier that will be used to identify the results in the database.
• --include <INCLUDE>: the inverse of --exclude. The argument is a comma-separated list of benchmark prefixes. When this option is specified, a benchmark is included in the run only if its name matches one of the given prefixes.
• --category <CATEGORIES>: benchmark categories that should be included. The possible choices are one or more (comma-separated) of Primary, Secondary, Stable, and All. The default is Primary,Secondary.
• --profiles <PROFILES>: the profiles to be benchmarked. The possible choices are one or more (comma-separated) of Check, Debug, Doc, Opt, and All. The default is Check,Debug,Opt.
• --rustdoc <RUSTDOC>: a path (relative or absolute) to a rustdoc executable that will be benchmarked (but only if a Doc profile is requested with --profiles). If a Doc profile is requested, by default the tool will look for a rustdoc executable next to the rustc specified via the <RUSTC> argument.
• --scenarios <SCENARIOS>: the scenarios to be benchmarked. The possible choices are one or more (comma-separated) of Full, IncrFull, IncrUnchanged, IncrPatched, and All. The default is All. Note that IncrFull is always run if either of IncrUnchanged or IncrPatched are run (even if not requested).
• --backends <BACKENDS>: the codegen backends to be benchmarked. The possible choices are one or more (comma-separated) of Llvm, Cranelift. The default is Llvm.
• --self-profile: use rustc's -Zself-profile option to produce query/function tables in the output.

RUST_LOG=debug can be specified to enable verbose logging, which is useful for debugging collector itself.

How to compare different versions on your own machine

Often you'll want to compare two different compiler versions. For example, you might have two clones of the rustc repository: one that is unmodified, and a second that contains a branch of your changes. To compare the two versions, do something like this:

./target/release/collector bench_local --id Original $RUST_ORIGINAL

./target/release/collector bench_local --id Modified $RUST_MODIFIED

where $RUST_ORIGINAL and $RUST_MODIFIED are paths (relative or absolute) to the relevant rustc executables.

Runtime benchmarks

There is also a runtime benchmark suite, which measures the performance of Rust programs compiled by a selected version of rustc. You can run it using the following command:

./target/release/collector bench_runtime_local <RUSTC>

Benchmarking options

The following options alter the behaviour of the bench_runtime_local subcommand.

• --no-isolate: you can use this flag to make repeated local benchmarks faster. It will cause the collector to reuse compiled artifacts of the runtime benchmark groups.
• --group: Compile only the selected runtime benchmark group (i.e. only compile a crate inside the directory collector/runtime-benchmarks/<group>). This can be used to speed up local runtime benchmark experiments. Even with --no-isolate, it can take a few seconds to recompile all runtime benchmarks and discover all benchmarks within them. If you only want to run benchmark(s) from a single crate, you can use this to speed up the runtime benchmarking or profiling commands.

The bench_runtime_local command also shares some options with the bench_local command, notably --id, --db, --cargo, --cargo-config, --include, --exclude and --iterations.

How to view the measurements on your own machine

Once the benchmarks have been run, build and start the website. You can find instructions on how to do that here.

Wait for the "Loading complete" message to be printed, and then visit localhost:2346/compare.html in a web browser.

Enter the IDs for two runs in the "Commit/Date A" and "Commit/Date B" text boxes and click on "Submit". You can enter the same ID twice, though in that case you won't be shown any percentage differences.

If you've collected new data, you can run curl -X POST localhost:2346/perf/onpush to update the site's view of the data, or just restart the server.

Benchmarking on Windows

To benchmark on Windows, you will need to run the collector in a elevated context so that it can access the hardware performance counters. Note: some virtualized environments do not permit access to these counters for guest VMs.

You will also need to provide the paths to the xperf and tracelog tools (or have them available on your PATH). Some common paths to these tools look like:

$env:XPERF="C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Windows Performance Toolkit\xperf.exe"
$env:TRACELOG="C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.19041.0\x64\tracelog.exe"

Finally, while most of the options you can pass to the collector are supported, the majority of the profilers used in the profile_local command are not. In Windows, the only currently supported profiler is the self-profiler.

As a complete example, let's run just the regex-1.5.5 benchmark in the Debug profile with self-profiling results available:

$env:XPERF="C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Windows Performance Toolkit\xperf.exe"
$env:TRACELOG="C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.19041.0\x64\tracelog.exe"
.\target\release\collector.exe bench_local $env:RUST_ORIGINAL --id Original --profiles Debug --include regex-1.5.5 --self-profile
.\target\release\collector.exe bench_local $env:RUST_MODIFIED --id Modified --profiles Debug --include regex-1.5.5 --self-profile
.\target\release\site.exe .\results.db

The open a web browser to http://localhost:2346/compare.html?start=Original&end=Modified&stat=instructions%3Au.

Note: This example uses Powershell syntax.

Technical details of the benchmark server

We download the artifacts (rustc, rust-std, cargo) produced by CI and properly unarchive them into the correct directories to allow cargo and rustc to function. Currently only x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu is supported, but the system should expand to other platforms (e.g., Windows) with some work.

The Linux perf tool is used to gather most of the data.

Benchmarking will only work for commits that have been built on rust-lang/rust repository in the last ~168 days, including try commits. Local benchmarking is of course theoretically possible for any commit, though some of the benchmarks may require recent compilers to build without patching.

Profiling

This section is about profiling rustc, in order to determine how its execution might be optimized.

Preparation

If you are going to use any of the profilers that rely on line numbers (OProfile, Cachegrind, Callgrind, DHAT, Massif or Bytehound) use the following config.toml file for your local build.

[llvm]
release-debuginfo = true
[rust]
debuginfo-level = 1

Without this you won't get useful file names and line numbers in the output.

Profiling local builds

To profile a local rustc with one of several profilers:

./target/release/collector profile_local <PROFILER> <RUSTC>

It will profile the entire suite and put the results in a directory called results/.

The mandatory <PROFILER> argument must be one of the following.

• self-profile: Profile with rustc's -Zself-profile.

  • Purpose. This gathers the same high-level query/function data as the --self-profile option of the bench_local subcommand, but it presents the data in three different forms.
  • Slowdown. Minimal.
  • Output. Raw output is written to a directory with a Zsp prefix. The files in that directory can be processed with various measureme tools. Human-readable output from summarize is written to a file with a summarize prefix; this is very similar to the query/function tables produced by bench_local with the --self-profile option. Output from flamegraph, viewable with a web browser, is written to a file with a flamegraph prefix. Output from crox, viewable with Chromium's profiler, is written to a file with a crox prefix.

• perf-record: Profile with perf-record, a sampling profiler.

  • Purpose. perf-record is a general-purpose profiler, good for seeing where execution time is spent and finding hot functions.
  • Slowdown. Negligible.
  • Output. Binary output is written to files with a perf prefix. Those files can be read with perf-report and other similar perf commands, or with the excellent Hotspot viewer.

• oprofile: Profile with OProfile, a sampling profiler.

  • Purpose. OProfile is a general-purpose profiler, good for seeing where execution time is spent and finding hot functions and lines.
  • Slowdown. Negligible.
  • Output. Binary output is written to a directory with an opout prefix. That directory can be processed with opreport and opannotate. Human-readable output is also written to files with an oprep and an opann prefix.
  • Notes. OProfile fails moderately often with this message: "operf-record process killed by signal 13". The failures seem to be random; re-running often results in success.

• samply: Profile with Samply, a sampling profiler.

  • Purpose. Samply is a general-purpose profiler, good for seeing where execution time is spent and finding hot functions.
  • Slowdown. Negligible.
  • Output. Binary output is written to a file with a samply prefix. That file can be loaded with samply load.

• cachegrind: Profile with Cachegrind, a tracing profiler. Requires Valgrind 3.15 or later.

  • Purpose. Cachegrind provides global, per-function, and per-source-line instruction counts. This fine-grained information can be extremely useful. Cachegrind's results are almost deterministic, which eases comparisons across multiple runs.
  • Slowdown. Roughly 3--10x.
  • Configuration. Within profile_local, Cachegrind is configured to not simulate caches and the branch predictor, even though it can, because the simulation slows it down and 99% of the time instruction counts are all you need.
  • Output. Raw output is written to files with a cgout prefix. Human-readable text output is written to files with a cgann prefix.
  • Diffs. The cg_diff command can be used to diff two different raw output files, which is very useful for comparing profiles produce by two different versions of rustc. If those two versions are in different directories (such as rust0 and rust1), use a flag like --mod-filename='s/rust[01]/rustN/g' to eliminate path differences.

• callgrind: Profile with Callgrind, a tracing profiler. Requires Valgrind 3.15 or later.

  • Purpose. Callgrind collects the same information as Cachegrind, plus function call information. So it can be used like either Cachegrind or perf-record. However, it cannot perform diffs between profiles.
  • Slowdown. Roughly 5--20x.
  • Configuration. Like Cachegrind, within profile_local Callgrind is configured to not simulate caches and the branch predictor.
  • Output. Raw output is written to files with a clgout prefix; those files can be viewed with the graphical KCachegrind tool. Human-readable text output is also written to files with a clgann prefix; this output is much the same as the cgann-prefixed files produced by Cachegrind, but with extra annotations showing function call counts.

• dhat: Profile with DHAT, a heap profiler. Requires Valgrind 3.15 or later.

  • Purpose. DHAT is good for finding which parts of the code are causing a lot of allocations. This is relevant if another profiler such as perf-record or Cachegrind tell you that malloc and free are hot functions (as they often are). It also gives insight into peak memory usage, similar to Massif.
  • Slowdown. Roughly 5--20x.
  • Configuration. DHAT is configured within profile_local to run with the non-default --num-callers=4 option, which dictates stack depths. (This value of 4 does not include inlined stack frames, so in practice the depths of stack traces are a lot more than 4.) This is almost always enough, but on the rare occasion it isn't, you can change the value in rustc-fake.rs and rebuild collector. Note that higher values make DHAT run more slowly and increase the size of its data files.
  • Output. Raw output is written to files with a dhout prefix. Those files can be viewed with DHAT's viewer (dh_view.html). You can find dh_view.html in the dhat directory of the Valgrind repository. It is also deployed e.g. here.

• dhat-copy: Profile with DHAT in "copy mode". Requires Valgrind 3.17 or later.

  • Purpose. DHAT's copy mode is good for finding which parts of the code are causing a lot of memory copies. This is relevant if another profiler such as perf-record or Cachegrind tell you that functions like memcpy or memmove are hot (as they often are).
  • Slowdown. Roughly 5--20x.
  • Configuration. Same as for DHAT.
  • Output. Raw output is written to files with a dhcopy prefix. Those files can be viewed with DHAT's viewer (dh_view.html).

• massif: Profile with Massif, a heap profiler.

  • Purpose. Massif is designed to give insight into a program's peak memory usage.
  • Slowdown. Roughly 3--10x.
  • Output. Raw output is written to files with a msout prefix. Those files can be post-processed with ms_print or viewed with the graphical massif-visualizer; the latter is recommended, though it sometimes fails to read output files that ms_print can handle.

• bytehound: Profile with Bytehound, a memory profiler. You must add the directory containing libbytehound.so to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable when you use this profiler.

  • Purpose. Bytehound is designed to give insight into a program's memory usage.
  • Slowdown. Roughly 2--4x.
  • Output. Raw output is written to files with a bytehound prefix. Those files can be viewed with the bytehound server <filename> command.

• eprintln: Profile via stderr, e.g. by using eprintln! statements.

  • Purpose. Sometimes it is useful to do ad hoc profiling by inserting eprintln! statements into rustc, e.g. to count how often particular paths are hit, or to see what values particular expressions have each time they are executed. Alternatively, you can trigger some of rustc's built-in profiling modes via environment variables, such as RUSTFLAGS=-Ztime-passes or RUSTFLAGS=-Zhir-stats.
  • Slowdown. Depends on how much extra output is being produced on stderr.
  • Output. Everything written to stderr is copied to files with an eprintln prefix. Those files can be post-processed in any appropriate fashion; counts is one possibility.

• llvm-lines: Profile with cargo llvm-lines a code size measurer.

  • Purpose. This command counts the number of lines of LLVM IR are generated across all instantiations of each function. In other words, it's a tool for finding code bloat.
  • Slowdown. It Is likely to run faster than normal compilation.
  • Output. Human-readable output is written to files with an ll prefix.
  • Notes. Does not work with the Check profile. Also does not work with the IncrFull, IncrUnchanged, and IncrPatched scenarios.

• llvm-ir: Dump rustc-generated LLVM IR (before any LLVM passes)

  • Purpose. This command provides access to the raw LLVM IR rustc produces, which can be used for targeted improvements to functions (e.g., those that get monomorphized a lot) and optimization of rustc IR emission in general.
  • Slowdown. Likely runs faster than regular builds due to skipping most of the LLVM work.
  • Output. Produces llir prefixed files, in LLVM IR textual format.

• mono-items: Dump monomorphization items for each (merged) CGU in the crate. These are also post-processed from the raw format into per-file dumps.

  • Purpose. This is useful to investigate changes in CGU partionining.
  • Slowdown. Equivalent to normal compilation.
  • Output. File per CGU, currently, placed in a directory inside results.
  • Notes. Will likely work best with the Full scenario, on either Debug or Opt profiles.

• dep-graph: Dump the incremental dependency graph (as produced by -Zdump-dep-graph).

  • Purpose. This is useful when debugging changes to incremental behavior.
  • Slowdown. Equivalent to normal compilation.
  • Output. .dot and .txt file (.txt likely is what you want to see first).
  • Notes. Works primarily with incremental compilation scenarios.

The mandatory <RUSTC> argument is a path to a rustc executable or a +-prefixed toolchain specifier, the same as for bench_local.

The identifier that forms part of the output filenames is chosen in a similar fashion to the one chosen for bench_local.

Profiling options

The following options alter the behaviour of the profile_local subcommand.

• --cargo <CARGO>: as for bench_local.
• --cargo-config <CONFIG>: as for bench_local.
• --exclude <EXCLUDE>: as for bench_local.
• --id <ID>: an identifer that will form part of the output filenames.
• --include <INCLUDE>: as for bench_local.
• --out-dir <OUT_DIR>: a path (relative or absolute) to a directory in which the output will be placed. If the directory doesn't exist, it will be created. The default is results/.
• --profiles <PROFILES>: as for bench_local.
• --rustc2 <RUSTC>: if given, profiles a second Rust compiler for comparison against the first. If a non-toolchain identifier is being used, a 1 will be appended to the identifier for the first run and a 2 will be appended to the identifier for the second run. If the profiler being used is Cachegrind, diff files will also be produced.
• --rustdoc <RUSTDOC> as for bench_local.
• --scenarios <SCENARIOS>: as for bench_local.
• --backends <BACKENDS>: as for bench_local.
• --jobs <JOB-COUNT>: execute <JOB-COUNT> benchmarks in parallel. This is only allowed for certain profilers whose results are not affected by system noise (e.g. callgrind or eprintln).

RUST_LOG=debug can be specified to enable verbose logging, which is useful for debugging collector itself.

Profiling runtime benchmarks

It is also possible to profile runtime benchmarks using the following command:

./target/release/collector profile_runtime <PROFILER> <RUSTC> <BENCHMARK_NAME>

Currently, a <PROFILER> can be cachegrind, which will run the runtime benchmark under Cachegrind. If you pass --features precise-cachegrind, you can get more precise profiling results. In this mode, Cachegrind will only record the instructions of the actual benchmark, and ignore any other code (e.g. benchmark initialization). To use this mode, you need to provide a path to a Valgrind build directory (at least Valgrind 3.22 is required), like this:

DEP_VALGRIND=<path-to-valgrind-install>/include cargo run --release --bin collector \
  --features precise-cachegrind profile_runtime cachegrind <RUSTC> <BENCHMARK_NAME> 

Codegen diff

You can use the codegen_diff command to display the assembly, LLVM IR or MIR difference between two versions of rustc for individual functions of a single runtime benchmark group:

./target/release/collector codegen_diff <asm|asm-source|llvm|mir> <benchmark-name> <rustc> <rustc2>

Codegen diff is currently only implemented for runtime benchmarks.

Binary size statistics

You can use the binary_stats command to display size statistics (section and symbol sizes) of binary artifacts (executables, libraries). You can compare the binary statistics of:

• Selected compile benchmarks:

  ./target/release/collector binary_stats compile `<rustc>` --include <benchmark name> \
      [--profile <Debug|Opt>] \
      [--backend <Llvm|Cranelift>]

  You can also compare (diff) the size statistics between two compilers:

  ./target/release/collector binary_stats compile `<rustc>` --include <benchmark name> --rustc2 <rustc2>

  or between two codegen backends:

  ./target/release/collector binary_stats compile `<rustc>` --include <benchmark name> --rustc2 <rustc>
      --backend <Llvm|Cranelift> --backend2 <Llvm|Cranelift>

• Arbitrary binary/library on disk:

  ./target/release/collector binary_stats local `<binary/library path>` [<another binary/library path to compare to>]

How rustc wrapping works

When a crate is benchmarked or profiled, the real rustc is replaced with the rustc-fake binary, which parses commands passed from the collector and invokes the actual profiling or benchmarking tool.

Profiling/benchmarking a crate is performed in two steps:

1. Preparation - here all dependencies are compiled and build scripts are executed. During this step, cargo is invoked with ... -- --skip-this-rustc, which causes rustc-fake to skip compilation of the final/leaf crate. Cargo only passes arguments after -- to the final crate, therefore this does not affect the compilation of dependencies.
2. Profiling/benchmarking - cargo is invoked with --wrap-rustc-with <TOOL>, which executes the specified profiling tool by rustc-fake.