I am writing a C++ DLL for my Unity Windows application, where the dll will create multiple work-intense and time-critical threads. One surprising behaviour I observed was that the performance of the DLL was significantly worse in **Build** mode than **Editor** mode. To rule out the possibility that my function is affecting the performance, I did an experiment where I replaced my function with `std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(30))` and logged down the execution time. When in the Editor mode, the execution time was very consistently around 30 *ms* as expected. I ran the editor session for a long time to make sure the time measurement is consistent. However, when in the Build, I could always observe some sort of "hiccup" from time to time that the abnormal execution time can range from 35 ms to 45 ms. I allocated a console window to display the standard output from the DLL in both Editor and Build mode.
Here is the pseudo code of my DLL:
void initialize(std::thread *& pWorkerThread, [other_args]) {
pWorkerThread = new std::thread(WorkerFunction);
// Initialize other threads ...
}
void stop(std::thread *& pWorkerThread, [other_args]) {
// set stop_condition here
if (pWorkerThread->joinable()) {
pWorkerThread->join();
}
delete pWorkerThread;
pWorkerThread = NULL;
}
void WorkerFunction() {
while (!stop_condition) {
std::chrono::steady_clock::time_point t_start = std::chrono::steady_clock::now();
// simulate the work load
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(30));
std::chrono::steady_clock::time_point t_end = std::chrono::steady_clock::now();
std::chrono::duration dur = t_end - t_start;
std::cout << "Process duration: " << dur.count() << std::endl;
}
}
Since the editor is adding a lot of overhead, one would typically assume the performance is worse in Editor mode. In addition, since my c++ functions are built into the DLL, based on my understanding, they should behave the same regardless of which mode my Unity application calls them. I was suspecting the process and thread priority might be different in Build mode, so I manually set the priority class of my application to High_PRIORITY_CLASS using WinAPI, but it did not improve the situation at all. At this point, I have been stuck on this for days and I am running out of ideas for how this could happen and what to do. If someone could point out potential topics I should look at, or explain what are the differences between build and editor mode that could result in such performance issue, I would greatly appreciate it!
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