Optimization options

!! Page WIP !!

Build options can be specified as the environment variable

export RUSTFLAGS="-C option1=value1 -C option2=value2"

before running cargo build.

Another possibility is to collect all options in a custom profile that is specified in the Cargo.toml file at the root of the polkadot directory. In the polkadot source, there are already two such profiles:

[profile.release]
# Polkadot runtime requires unwinding.
panic = "unwind"
opt-level = 3

[profile.production]
inherits = "release"
lto = true
codegen-units = 1

As explained below, the production profile includes more advanced optimization options.

The maximum number of code generation units a crate can be split into. Standard value is 16. Choosing 1 may improve the performance of generated code.

In our testing, codegen=True means -C codegen=1, whereas codegen=False does not specify it explicitly and thus takes the default value.

Let LLVM optimize the whole code during linking. Three modes can be set with -C lto=?:

• no: self-explanatory
• fat: optimizations across whole code; longest build time
• thin: compromise between fat and disabled; significantly faster build time

If the option -C lto is not provided or not specified with the options above, LTO can still be enabled. To avoid ambiguities, we always specify the LTO options in our optimized builds.

LTO (thin or fat) does not always lead to improvement. Furthermore, while fat lto is much slower to compile, it is not always better than thin LTO. See here for details.

Specifying lto in RUSTFLAGS does not work and gives error: lto can only be run for executables, cdylibs and static library outputs. Hence, it need to be specified in Cargo.toml

TODO

Find your CPU architecture with rustc --print target-cpus Taking target-cpu = native will automatically take the most specific (advanced) architecture.

TODO