Tutorial on @snoop_inference

Inference may occur when you run code. Inference is the first step of type-specialized compilation. @snoop_inference collects data on what inference is doing, giving you greater insight into what is being inferred and how long it takes.

Compilation is needed only for "fresh" code; running the demos below on code you've already used will yield misleading results. When analyzing inference, you're advised to always start from a fresh session. See also the comparison between SnoopCompile and JET.

Add SnoopCompileCore, SnoopCompile, and helper packages to your environment

Here, we'll add these packages to your default environment. (With the exception of AbstractTrees, these "developer tool" packages should not be added to the Project file of any real packages unless you're extending the tool itself.)

using Pkg
Pkg.add(["SnoopCompileCore", "SnoopCompile", "AbstractTrees", "ProfileView"]);

Setting up the demo

To see @snoop_inference in action, we'll use the following demo:

module FlattenDemo
    struct MyType{T} x::T end

    extract(y::MyType) = y.x

    function domath(x)
        y = x + x
        return y*x + 2*x + 5
    end

    dostuff(y) = domath(extract(y))

    function packintype(x)
        y = MyType{Int}(x)
        return dostuff(y)
    end
end

# output

FlattenDemo

The main call, packintype, stores the input in a struct, and then calls functions that extract the field value and performs arithmetic on the result.

Collecting the data

To profile inference on this call, do the following:

julia> using SnoopCompileCore

julia> tinf = @snoop_inference FlattenDemo.packintype(1);

julia> using SnoopCompile

julia> tinf
InferenceTimingNode: 0.002712/0.003278 on Core.Compiler.Timings.ROOT() with 1 direct children

This may not look like much, but there's a wealth of information hidden inside tinf.

A quick check for potential invalidations

After running @snoop_inference, it's generally recommended to check the output of staleinstances:

julia> staleinstances(tinf)
SnoopCompileCore.InferenceTiming[]

If you see this, all's well. A non-empty list might indicate method invalidations, which can be checked (in a fresh session) using the tools described in Tutorial on @snoop_invalidations.

If you do have a lot of invalidations, precompile_blockers may be an effective way to reveal those invalidations that affect your particular package and workload.

Viewing the results

Let's start unpacking the output of @snoop_inference and see how to get more insight. First, notice that the output is an InferenceTimingNode: it's the root element of a tree of such nodes, all connected by caller-callee relationships. Indeed, this particular node is for Core.Compiler.Timings.ROOT(), a "dummy" node that is the root of all such trees.

You may have noticed that this ROOT node prints with two numbers. It will be easier to understand their meaning if we first display the whole tree. We can do that with the AbstractTrees package:

julia> using AbstractTrees

julia> print_tree(tinf, maxdepth=100)
InferenceTimingNode: 0.002712/0.003278 on Core.Compiler.Timings.ROOT() with 1 direct children
└─ InferenceTimingNode: 0.000133/0.000566 on FlattenDemo.packintype(::Int64) with 2 direct children
   ├─ InferenceTimingNode: 0.000094/0.000094 on FlattenDemo.MyType{Int64}(::Int64) with 0 direct children
   └─ InferenceTimingNode: 0.000089/0.000339 on FlattenDemo.dostuff(::FlattenDemo.MyType{Int64}) with 2 direct children
      ├─ InferenceTimingNode: 0.000064/0.000122 on FlattenDemo.extract(::FlattenDemo.MyType{Int64}) with 2 direct children
      │  ├─ InferenceTimingNode: 0.000034/0.000034 on getproperty(::FlattenDemo.MyType{Int64}, ::Symbol) with 0 direct children
      │  └─ InferenceTimingNode: 0.000024/0.000024 on getproperty(::FlattenDemo.MyType{Int64}, x::Symbol) with 0 direct children
      └─ InferenceTimingNode: 0.000127/0.000127 on FlattenDemo.domath(::Int64) with 0 direct children

This tree structure reveals the caller-callee relationships, showing the specific types that were used for each MethodInstance. Indeed, as the calls to getproperty reveal, it goes beyond the types and even shows the results of constant propagation; the getproperty(::MyType{Int64}, x::Symbol) corresponds to y.x in the definition of extract.

You can extract the MethodInstance with

julia> Core.MethodInstance(tinf)
MethodInstance for Core.Compiler.Timings.ROOT()

julia> Core.MethodInstance(tinf.children[1])
MethodInstance for FlattenDemo.packintype(::Int64)

Each node in this tree is accompanied by a pair of numbers. The first number is the exclusive inference time (in seconds), meaning the time spent inferring the particular MethodInstance, not including the time spent inferring its callees. The second number is the inclusive time, which is the exclusive time plus the time spent on the callees. Therefore, the inclusive time is always at least as large as the exclusive time.

The ROOT node is a bit different: its exclusive time measures the time spent on all operations except inference. In this case, we see that the entire call took approximately 3.3ms, of which 2.7ms was spent on activities besides inference. Almost all of that was code-generation, but it also includes the time needed to run the code. Just 0.55ms was needed to run type-inference on this entire series of calls. As you will quickly discover, inference takes much more time on more complicated code.

We can also display this tree as a flame graph, using the ProfileView.jl package:

julia> fg = flamegraph(tinf)
Node(FlameGraphs.NodeData(ROOT() at typeinfer.jl:75, 0x00, 0:10080857))

julia> using ProfileView

julia> ProfileView.view(fg)

You should see something like this:

Users are encouraged to read the ProfileView documentation to understand how to interpret this, but briefly:

• the horizontal axis is time (wide boxes take longer than narrow ones), the vertical axis is call depth
• hovering over a box displays the method that was inferred
• left-clicking on a box causes the full MethodInstance to be printed in your REPL session
• right-clicking on a box opens the corresponding method in your editor
• ctrl-click can be used to zoom in
• empty horizontal spaces correspond to activities other than type-inference
• any boxes colored red (there are none in this particular example, but you'll see some later) correspond to naively non-precompilable MethodInstances, in which the method is owned by one module but the types are from another unrelated module. Such MethodInstances are omitted from the precompile cache file unless they've been "marked" by PrecompileTools.@compile_workload or an explicit precompile directive.
• any boxes colored orange-yellow (there is one in this demo) correspond to methods inferred for specific constants (constant propagation).

You can explore this flamegraph and compare it to the output from print_tree.

Finally, flatten, on its own or together with accumulate_by_source, allows you to get an sense for the cost of individual MethodInstances or Methods.

The tools here allow you to get an overview of where inference is spending its time. This gives you insight into the major contributors to latency.