[LLVMdev] Timing the IRReader

[Eli Bendersky]

Hi,

While doing various profiling runs of llc, it's easy to notice that
some wall-clock time is not accounted for by -time-passes (e.g. only 7
out of 9.2 seconds for compiling gcc). Some of the "lost" time is in
reading the bitcode file (~ 1 sec). When reading textual IR, its
parsing actually takes almost as much time as doing the actual -O0
compilation!

I think it would be useful if we could ask the tools to time how long
IR reading took (perhaps expanding it later to break down
materialization, etc). In addition to significantly minimizing
un-accounted time, this can facilitate future attempts to optimize the
IR reading code. Any objections/insights?

If this is deemed useful, there's the question of implementation.

1. Piggybacking on time-passes (like DWARF dumping does) is probably
not the "right thing to do", and hard to implement too since some
tools like llvm-diff don't even link in the pass infrastructure (which
defines the required globals).
2. Creating a separate flag is feasible, but IRReader is currently
header-only. So an implementation file has to be created to hold the
actual flag.
3. Any other ideas?

Eli