Cobalt is designed to choose sensible parameters for all performance-related options and parameters, however sometimes these need to be explicitly set to allow Cobalt to run optimally for a specific platform. This document discusses some of the tweakable parameters in Cobalt that can have an affect on performance.
A number of tweaks are listed below in no particular order. Each item has a set of tags keywords to make it easy to search for items related to a specific type of performance metric (e.g. “framerate”).
Many of the tweaks involve implementing a Cobalt extension and returning different values from specific functions.
Cobalt has a number of different build configurations (e.g. “debug”, “devel”, “qa” and “gold” in slowest-to-fastest order), with varying degrees of optimizations enabled. For example, while “devel” has compiler optimizations enabled, it does not disable DCHECKS (debug assertions) which can decrease Cobalt's performance. The “qa” build is most similar to “gold”, but it still has some debug features enabled (such as the debug console which can consume memory, and decrease performance while it is visible). For the best performance, build Cobalt in the “gold” configuration.
Tags: framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, cpu memory, input latency.
If you‘re willing to accept a lower framerate, there is potential that JavaScript execution can be made to run faster (which can improve startup time, browse-to-watch time, and input latency). Without any special settings in place, the renderer will attempt to render each frame as fast as it can, limited only by the display’s refresh rate, which is usually 60Hz. By artificially throttling this rate to a lower value, like 30Hz, CPU resources can be freed to work on other tasks. You can enable framerate throttling by setting a return value for GetMinimumFrameIntervalInMilliseconds in your platform‘s Cobalt graphics extension. Setting it to 33, for example, will throttle Cobalt’s renderer to 30 frames per second (as there'll be one frame every 33 milliseconds).
Tags: Cobalt extension, framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency.
Cobalt's image cache is used to cache decoded image data. The image data in the image cache is stored as a texture, and so it will occupy GPU memory. The image cache capacity dictates how long images will be kept resident in memory even if they are not currently visible on the web page. By reducing this value, you can lower GPU memory usage, at the cost of having Cobalt make more network requests and image decodes for previously seen images. Cobalt will automatically set the image cache capacity to a reasonable value, but if you wish to override this, you can do so by setting the CobaltImageCacheSizeInBytes function in your Cobalt configuration extension. For the YouTube web app, we have found that at 1080p, 32MB will allow around 5 thumbnail shelves to stay resident at a time, with 720p and 4K resolutions using proportionally less and more memory, respectively.
Tags: Cobalt extension, cpu memory, gpu memory.
Cobalt provides a feature where the image cache capacity will be reduced as soon as video playback begins. This can be useful for reducing peak GPU memory usage, which usually occurs during video playback. The downside to lowering the image cache during video playback is that it may need to evict some images when the capacity changes, and so it is more likely that Cobalt will have to re-download and decode images after returning from video playback. Note that this feature is not well tested. The feature can be activated by setting CobaltImageCacheCapacityMultiplierWhenPlayingVideo to a value between 0.0 and 1.0 in your Cobalt configuration extension. The image cache capacity will be multiplied by this value during video playback.
Tags: Cobalt extension, gpu memory.
This only affects GLES renderers. Skia sets up glyph atlases to which it software rasterizes glyphs the first time they are encountered, and from which the glyphs are used as textures for hardware accelerated glyph rendering to the render target. Adjusting this value will adjust GPU memory usage, but at the cost of performance as text glyphs will be less likely to be cached already. Note that if experimenting with modifications to this setting, be sure to test many languages, as some are more demanding (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) on the glyph cache than others. This value can be adjusted by changing the values of the CobaltSkiaGlyphAtlasWidth and CobaltSkiaGlyphAtlasHeight variables in your Cobalt configuration extension. Note that by default, these will be automatically configured by Cobalt to values found to be optimal for the application's resolution.
Tags: Cobalt extension, gpu memory, input latency, framerate.
This only affects Starboard Blitter API renderers. The Starboard Blitter API has only limited support for rendering special effects, so often Cobalt will have to fallback to a software rasterizer for rendering certain visual elements (most notably, text). In order to avoid expensive software renders, the results are cached and re-used across frames. The software surface cache is crucial to achieving an acceptable framerate on Blitter API platforms. The size of this cache is specified by the CobaltSoftwareSurfaceCacheSizeInBytes variable in your Cobalt configuration extension.
Tags: Cobalt extension, gpu memory, framerate.
Just-in-time (JIT) compilation of JavaScript is well known to significantly improve the speed of JavaScript execution. However, in the context of Cobalt and its web apps (like YouTube's HTML5 TV application), JITting may not be the best or fastest thing to do. Enabling JIT can result in Cobalt using more memory (to store compiled code) and can also actually slow down JavaScript execution (e.g. time must now be spent compiling code). It is recommended that JIT support be left disabled, but you can experiment with it by implementing the CobaltExtensionConfigurationApi method CobaltEnableJit() to return true to enable JIT, or false to disable it.
Tags: Cobalt extension, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency, cpu memory.
Some platforms require that the display buffer is swapped frequently, and so in these cases Cobalt will render the scene every frame, even if it is not changing, which consumes CPU resources. If the platform needs a new frame submitted periodically implement the Cobalt Extension “dev.cobalt.extension.Graphics” and report the maximum frame interval via GetMaximumFrameIntervalInMilliseconds.
See SbSystemGetExtension and CobaltExtensionGraphicsApi.
Every cobalt_minimum_frame_time_in_milliseconds, this function will be queried to determine if a new frame should be presented even if the scene has not changed.
Tags: configuration_public.h, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency, framerate.
If you set the CobaltConfigurationExtensionApi function CobaltRenderDirtyRegionOnly to return true, then Cobalt will invoke logic to detect which part of the frame has been affected by animations and can be configured to only render to that region. However, this feature requires support from the driver for GLES platforms. In particular, eglChooseConfig() will first be called with EGL_SWAP_BEHAVIOR_PRESERVED_BIT set in its attribute list. If this fails, Cobalt will call eglChooseConfig() again without EGL_SWAP_BEHAVIOR_PRESERVED_BIT set and dirty region rendering will be disabled. By having Cobalt render only small parts of the screen, CPU (and GPU) resources can be freed to work on other tasks. This can especially affect startup time since usually only a small part of the screen is updating (e.g. displaying an animated spinner). Thus, if possible, ensure that your EGL/GLES driver supports EGL_SWAP_BEHAVIOR_PRESERVED_BIT. Note that it is possible (but not necessary) that GLES drivers will implement this feature by allocating a new offscreen buffer, which can significantly affect GPU memory usage. If you are on a Blitter API platform, enabling this functionality will result in the allocation and blit of a fullscreen “intermediate” back buffer target.
Tags: Cobalt extension, startup, framerate, gpu memory.
Cobalt makes use of thread priorities to ensure that animations remain smooth even while JavaScript is being executed, and to ensure that JavaScript is processed (e.g. in response to a key press) before images are decoded. Thus having support for priorities can improve the overall performance of the application. To enable thread priority support, you should set the value of kSbHasThreadPrioritySupport to true in your configuration_constants.h file, and then also ensure that your platform's implementation of SbThreadCreate() properly forwards the priority parameter down to the platform.
Tags: configuration_public.h, framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency.
Huge performance improvements can be obtained by ensuring that the right optimizations are enabled by your compiler and linker flag settings. You can set these up within platform_configuration/BUILD.gn by adjusting the cflags, ldflags, and more. Keep in mind you can use is_gold and other such boolean values to only apply optimizations where performance is critical. Note that unless you explicitly set this up, it is unlikely that compiler/linker flags will carry over from external shell environment settings; they must be set explicitly in platform_configuration/BUILD.gn.
Tags: framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency
For qa and gold configs, different compiler flags can be used for GN targets which should be optimized for size vs speed. This can be used to reduce the executable size with minimal impact on performance.
To set these flags, implement size and/or speed configs (preferably in platform_configuration/BUILD.gn), and point to them using the size_config_path and speed_config_path variables, set in platform_configuration/configuration.gni.
Performance-critical targets remove the size config and add the speed config like so:
configs -= [ "//starboard/build/config:size" ] configs += [ "//starboard/build/config:speed" ]
The size config is applied by default.
Tags: cpu memory, package size
If your toolchain supports it, it is recommended that you enable the LTO optimization, as it has been reported to yield significant performance improvements in many high profile projects.
Tags: framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency
The YouTube web app offers a feature called “Stats for Nerds” that enables a stats overlay to appear on the screen during video playback. Rendering this overlay requires a significant amount of processing, so it is recommended that all performance evaluation is done without the “Stats for Nerds” overlay active. This can greatly affect browse-to-watch time and potentially affect the video frame drop rate.
Tags: browse-to-watch, framerate, youtube.
Cobalt provides a debug console in non-gold builds to allow the display of variables overlaid on top of the application. This can be helpful for debugging issues and keeping track of things like app lifetime, but the debug console consumes significant resources when it is visible in order to render it, so it should be hidden when performance is being evaluated.
Tags: framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency.
Cobalt includes dlmalloc and can be configured to use it to handle all memory allocations. It should be carefully evaluated however whether dlmalloc performs better or worse than your system allocator, in terms of both memory fragmentation efficiency as well as runtime performance. To use dlmalloc, you should adjust your starboard_platform target to use the Starboard starboard/memory.h function implementations defined in starboard/shared/dlmalloc/. To use your system allocator, you should adjust your starboard_platform target to use the Starboard starboard/memory.h function implementations defined in starboard/shared/iso/.
Tags: framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency, cpu memory.
During video playback, memory is reserved by Cobalt to contain the encoded media data (separated into video and audio), and we refer to this memory as the media buffers. By default, Cobalt pre-allocates the memory and wraps it with a custom allocator, in order to avoid fragmentation of main memory. However, depending on your platform and your system allocator, overall memory usage may improve if media buffer allocations were made normally via the system allocator instead. This can be achieved by setting SbMediaGetInitialBufferCapacity and SbMediaGetBufferAllocationUnit to 0 in your implementation of media.h. Note also that if you choose to pre-allocate memory, for 1080p video it has been found that 24MB is a good media buffer size. The pre-allocated media buffer capacity size can be adjusted by modifying the value of SbMediaGetInitialBufferCapacity mentioned above.
Tags: configuration_public.h, cpu memory.
Many of the parameters around media buffer allocation can be adjusted in your media.h Starboard implementation. In particular, if your maximum video output resolution is less than 1080, then you may lower the budgets for many of the categories according to your maximum resolution.
Tags: cpu memory
The YouTube web app is able to display a Frames Per Second (FPS) counter in the corner when the URL parameter “fps=1” is set. Unfortunately, activating this timer will cause Cobalt to re-layout and re-render the scene frequently in order to update the FPS counter. Instead, we recommend instead to either measure the framerate in the GLES driver and periodically printing it, or hacking Cobalt to measure the framerate and periodically print it. In order to hack in an FPS counter, you will want to look at the HardwareRasterizer::Impl::Submit() function in cobalt/renderer/rasterizer/skia/hardware_rasterizer.cc. The work required to update the counter has the potential to affect many aspects of performance. TODO: Cobalt should add a command line switch to enable printing of the framerate in gold builds.
Tags: framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency,
The Starboard header file starboard/image.h defines functions that allow platforms to implement hardware-accelerated image decoding, if available. In particular, if SbImageIsDecodeSupported() returns true for the specified mime type and output format, then instead of using the software-based libpng or libjpeg libraries, Cobalt will instead call SbImageDecode(). SbImageDecode() is expected to return a decoded image as a SbDecodeTarget option, from which Cobalt will extract a GL texture or Blitter API surface object when rendering. If non-CPU hardware is used to decode images, it would alleviate the load on the CPU, and possibly also increase the speed at which images can be decoded.
Tags: startup, browse-to-watch, input latency.
Cobalt has support for generating profiling data that is viewable through Chromium's about:tracing tool. This feature is available in all Cobalt configurations except for “gold” (“qa” is the best build to use for performance investigations here). There are currently two ways to tell Cobalt to generate this data:
timed_trace.json.h5vcc_trace_event.json.The directory the output files will be placed within is the directory that the Starboard function SbSystemGetPath() returns with a path_id of kSbSystemPathDebugOutputDirectory, so you may need to check your implementation of SbSystemGetPath() to discover where this is.
Once the trace file is created, it can be opened in Chrome by navigating to about:tracing or chrome://tracing, clicking the “Load” button near the top left, and then opening the JSON file created earlier.
Of particular interest in the output view is the MainWebModule thread where JavaScript and layout are executed, and Rasterizer where per-frame rendering takes place.
Tags: framerate, startup, browse-to-watch, input latency.