Profiling & Performance

Ceno includes tools to help you analyze and optimize the performance of your ZK programs.

Execution Profiling

You can profile the execution of your guest program by using the --profiling flag with the cargo ceno run or other binary commands. This will output detailed statistics about the execution, such as cycle counts for different parts of the program.

For example:

cargo ceno run --profiling=1 -- <your_program>

The value passed to --profiling controls the granularity of the profiling information.

The output will show a tree of spans with timing information, allowing you to identify performance bottlenecks in your code.

Benchmarking

The ceno_zkvm crate contains a benches directory with several benchmarks. You can use these as a reference for writing your own benchmarks using criterion.

Running the benchmarks can give you an idea of the performance of different operations and help you optimize your code. To run the benchmarks, you can use the standard cargo bench command.