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After selecting the “Start Test” button, the tests will be executed and the results will appear in the “Results” pane. The results can be saved to a CSV file using the ‘Save Results’ button.

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Profiling

When a layout is running, its computation and memory usage can be measured by selecting the ‘Tools 🡪 Profile Running Layout’ menu item. This will pop up a dialog displaying fine grained profiling information for the entire layout and for each module.

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Manual Profiling

In addition to the real-time profiling offered by Profile Running Layout menu, Designer also provides the ‘Tools 🡪 Manual Profile Layout’ tool. The Manual Profiling tool  manually pumps each sublayout in a design with tuning commands, which does not rely on any real-time audio interrupts. Collecting data in this way allows for more accurate profiling in certain situations:

  • Multi-rate Layouts (multiple clockdividers). Because each clockdivided sublayout is typically called in its own thread, the pre-emption of lower priority threads can introduce double-counting while profiling a multi-rate layouts in real time. This can lead to over-estimates of CPU load for sublayouts. Manual profiling pumps each sublayout independently so no pre-emption can occur.

  • If a layout is exceeding 100% CPU load. Traditional profiling can be inaccurate in this case since audio frames are being missed and not counted towards overall cycles. Since there is no timing requirement when manually pumping layouts, manual profiling can provide accurate CPU loads greater than 100%.

  • If real-time audio is not available on the connected target. This happens most often when the firmware for the target is still under development, but the CPU load required by a layout needs to be known. Only a tuning interface is required on the target for the Manual Profiling tool to measure CPU load.

Additionally, the Manual Profiling tool allows the user to input an audio file in order to profile the layout under specific scenarios. Both real-time and manual profiling results can be saved to file for later use using the ‘Export to File’ button. Results will be refreshed using the ‘Refresh’ button.Designer offers a number of ways to profile computational and memory usage of a layout loaded on a target.

  • Real-Time Profiling: This tool collects average CPU and memory usage details of the running layout and of each module in the layout. Real-Time Profiling supports multiple clock-dividers and Multi-Instance targets, and results can be exported to .csv files.

  • Manual Profiling: This tool can report the same information as the Real-Time Profiling tool, but the data collection happens differently. Rather than querying the target while the layout is pumped in real time, this tool sends individual pump commands to the target and collects the profiling data based on this non-real-time processing. Manual Profiling can sometimes report more accurate profiling results than Real-Time Profiling, for example if any of the following are true:

    • the CPU load required to run the layout on the target is greater than 100%

    • the target does not have real-time audio processing implemented

    • the system has a lot of pre-emption that can interrupt audio processing

  • Peak Profiling: While the layout is running on the target, the Peak Profiling tool queries the target’s average and peak CPU load for the user defined duration and plots the results. Peak Profiling supports multiple clock-dividers and Multi-Instance targets, and results can be exported to .csv files.

  • AWE_Server Profiling: The AWE_Server GUI shows a high level view of memory usage across each AWE heap, and the total % of CPU usage of the selected AWE Instance.

For more details on all of these types of profiling, see this application note: https://documentation.dspconcepts.com/awe-designer/latest-version/profiling-in-audio-weaver-tips-and-tricks

Show Unsaved Changes

To see all the changes since the last save, select ‘Tools Show Unsaved Changes’ for a display using the diff tool the you set in the ‘Global Preferences’ Dialog.

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