Profiler

When a game starts to chug, you need to know where the time is going. The Profiler is a lightweight, built-in way to measure how long sections of your code take, averaged over recent frames.

It lives in the root Clockwork namespace, so no extra using is needed beyond using Clockwork;.

Tracking Sections

Wrap the code you want to measure in a matching StartOrResumeTracking / FinishTracking pair, identified by a string key:

public override void OnUpdate()
{
    Profiler.StartOrResumeTracking("pathfinding");
    UpdatePathfinding();
    Profiler.FinishTracking("pathfinding");
}

You can track as many sections as you like, each with its own key. Because tracking resumes, you can also profile a section that's split across multiple calls in a frame by pausing in between:

Profiler.StartOrResumeTracking("ai");
// ...part of the work...
Profiler.PauseTracking("ai");
// ...something else...
Profiler.StartOrResumeTracking("ai");
// ...the rest...
Profiler.FinishTracking("ai");

Viewing Results

Profiler.DrawDebug draws every tracked section and its average time as an overlay. Call it from a draw loop, ideally OnDrawGUI so it isn't affected by the camera:

public override void OnDrawGUI()
{
    Profiler.DrawDebug(16, Colors.Lime);
}

Averages are computed over the most recent frames, so the numbers stay readable instead of flickering every frame.

Toggling

Profiling has overhead, so you'll usually want it off in shipping builds. The Profiler.IsActive flag turns all tracking on or off globally:

Profiler.IsActive = buildConfiguration.IsDebug;

When inactive, the tracking calls become cheap no-ops, so you can leave them in your code.

PerformanceTracker

Profiler is built on PerformanceTracker, which you can also use directly if you want to own a single timer rather than a keyed collection:

PerformanceTracker tracker = new();

tracker.StartOrResume();
DoExpensiveWork();
tracker.Finish();

float average = tracker.GetAverageTime();

Like Profiler, it supports Pause for splitting work across a frame, has an IsActive toggle, and averages over a rolling window. The static PerformanceTracker.FramesTracked field controls how many frames that window spans (default 600).