Unlock Bot Potential: CPU Profiling For Peak Performance

The Heart of the Matter: Why CPU Management is Crucial for Your Bot

Hey fellow bot commanders! Ever wondered what truly makes a high-performing bot stand out in a complex game like Screeps? It all boils down to efficient CPU management. Just like a well-oiled machine, your bot needs precise control over its computational resources to thrive and conquer. Our CPU profiling and budget enforcement system is designed to be the brain behind that control, ensuring your digital empire runs smoothly, especially as it scales. The Strategic Context for this initiative is rooted in the demanding performance targets outlined in our ROADMAP.md. We've set some ambitious yet essential CPU targets: for Eco rooms, we're aiming for a lean ≤0.1 CPU per tick; for War rooms, a slightly higher but still stringent ≤0.25 CPU per tick; and for the entire Empire, a critical ≤1 CPU every 20-50 ticks. These aren't just arbitrary numbers; they are the bedrock of a scalable and sustainable bot operation, preventing bottlenecks and ensuring fair play on the game server. However, the current reality is that we lack a systematic, robust CPU profiling mechanism to accurately validate these targets. Imagine trying to manage a vast corporation without any financial reports – that's kind of where we are now with CPU usage. As our bot grows from a handful of rooms to a sprawling network of 100+ rooms, the need for precise CPU budget enforcement becomes not just important, but absolutely critical. Without it, we're flying blind, risking performance degradation, missed ticks, and ultimately, a less competitive bot. This isn't just about tweaking numbers; it's about building a foundation for future growth and ensuring our bot can handle anything the game throws at it, all while staying within the server's generous but not infinite CPU limits. A proper system will help us understand where every precious CPU cycle goes, allowing us to proactively optimize and maintain peak performance across our entire bot empire. This proactive approach will save us countless hours of debugging down the line, and crucially, enable us to consistently meet or even exceed the high-performance expectations we've set for ourselves. We're talking about a significant leap in operational intelligence, moving from reactive problem-solving to predictive optimization, a true game-changer for any serious Screeps player. Therefore, implementing a comprehensive CPU profiling and budget enforcement system isn't just a technical task; it's a strategic imperative for our bot's long-term success and dominance.

Peeking Under the Hood: Understanding Our Current Performance Landscape

To truly appreciate where we're going, it's vital to understand our starting point. When we look at the Performance Evidence, it's clear that while we have some pieces of the puzzle, a complete picture of our bot's CPU usage is still elusive. In its Current State, our bot comprises a significant 164 TypeScript files, reflecting a complex and evolving codebase. Yet, despite this sophistication, we have no centralized CPU profiling beyond some very basic, high-level statistics. This means we lack the granular detail needed to pinpoint exactly which parts of our code are consuming the most CPU, especially on a per-room or per-process basis. Many of our core subsystems, such as the spawn, economy, and defense modules, currently operate without specific CPU budgets. While they perform their tasks, there's no automated guardrail to tell us when they're getting too greedy with the CPU. This can lead to unexpected performance spikes and, eventually, a hit to our overall tick rate. The ROADMAP.md itself, in Section 18, explicitly calls for