Targeted profiling of code segments

If our performance problem isn't resolved by the checklist mentioned previously, then we probably have a real issue on our hands that demands further analysis. The Profiler window is effective at showing us a broad overview of performance; it can help us find specific frames to investigate and can quickly inform us which MonoBehaviour and/or method may be causing issues. We would then need to figure out whether the problem is reproducible, under what circumstances a performance bottleneck arises, and where exactly within the problematic code block the issue is originating from.

To accomplish these, we will need to perform some profiling of targeted sections of our code, and there are a handful of useful techniques we can employ for this task. For Unity projects, they essentially fit into two categories:

• Controlling the Profiler from script code
• Custom timing and logging methods

Note that the next section focuses on how to investigate Scripting bottlenecks through C# code. Detecting the source of bottlenecks in other engine subsystems will be discussed in their related chapters.