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From Odwiki

During rendering, mantra can generate profiling statistics which can be used to optimize or bugfix shaders. Mantra will provide a count of the number of times a VEX function inside a shader is called along with the time it took. Rendering with VEXProfiling turned on will cause the render to run a little slower but the information yielded can be quite useful.

Turn profiling on in the "Command" field of the MantraROP, or on the command line if you're rendering ifds outside of Houdini.

mantra -V p <sphere.ifd

Mantra can also do NAN detection (Not A Number) which will check for NANs during the shader execution. This can help you track down bugs in your shaders, like division-by-zero's and such.

mantra -V P <sphere.ifd       # upper case P

VEXProfiling can also be done for VexSOPs, VexPOPs and other OPs using the hscript command vexprofile.