Measure Pipeline Latency - Measure Pipeline Latency - 6.3 English - XD056

GStreamer provides a built-in latency tracer that measures source-to-sink latency per buffer. Enable it through environment variables when launching the pipeline:

GST_DEBUG="GST_TRACER:7" \
GST_TRACERS="latency(flags=pipeline+element)" \
gst-launch-1.0 <pipeline>

The flags parameter controls what is measured:

• pipeline – end-to-end source-to-sink latency (default).

• element – per-element latency between pads.

• reported – latency reported by each element via the LATENCY query.

Combine multiple flags with +, for example latency(flags=pipeline+element+reported).

To write the tracer output to a file for offline analysis:

GST_DEBUG="GST_TRACER:7" \
GST_TRACERS="latency(flags=pipeline+element)" \
GST_DEBUG_FILE=latency.log \
gst-launch-1.0 <pipeline>

For the full tracer reference, see the upstream GStreamer documentation: latency tracer.