How to properly do profiling?

[ngocphamm]

I have been trying to profile my neovim load time with the built-in profiling feature of packer.

I run nvim, run :PackerCompile profile=true, restart nvim, run :PackerProfile but this is all I see. I'm fairly sure it doesn't show all my plugins.

This is my init.lua, based off kickstart.nvim

https://gist.github.com/ngocphamm/151a0ab737eb93418b62ff3802de9b5c

[wbthomason]

Nope, that's actually accurate - packer's profiling is specifically for the cost of packer_compiled.lua, where all of packer's lazy-loading logic is handled. Since you don't have any lazy-loading, and only use a sequenced load (after and a conditional load cond), that plus the little bit of metadata definition, etc. that everyone has is all taht gets reported.

[ngocphamm]

@wbthomason Thanks for your response!

So are you saying my neovim loads in about 5ms (sequenced load + conditional load, other stuff looks super minimal)?

Because when I do nvim --startuptime it's reporting about 85ms.

I was looking at this plugin, and it showed some profiling of plugin loading time (near the end of the link), so I thought it's from Packer, then I tried and didn't see anything similar to that.

[wbthomason]

No, the 5ms is just packer's contribution. nvim --startuptime reports a more accurate number (although even this isn't quite the same as the "true" startup time). I would suggest trying a plugin like https://github.com/dstein64/vim-startuptime to get a global profile of your startup time - you can use packer's profiling to break down the cost of packer_compiled.lua (which appears as a single item in profilers like the plugin I linked).

[ngocphamm]

Thank you! I will give that plugin a try!