Using Autogenerated Weights

Question

I'm wondering about weights. The docs are quite outdated here and I do not understand what is going on. I've managed to create benchmarks and generate a weight.rs.

https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/blob/master/frame/examples/basic/src/weights.rs has SubstrateWeight and WeightInfo whereas it seems that the tutorial suggest to write WeightInfo somewhat as a copy & paste from SubstrateWeight in what looks to me like a lot of redundant code, because they only differ in the database weights they assume. There is no explanation whatsoever.

The weight.rs is generated as WeightInfo which seems to be required to be renamed to SubstrateWeight in order for things to work.

This feels cumbersome. Can someone share some light on how this is all meant

Answer 1

There is no manual editing necessary, also no Copy & Paste. Generating weights for a pallet works with the benchmark pallet command.

Depending on where you want to use your Pallet weights, you may want to use different templates.
If you are operating in the Substrate repo; You can look at other pallet weight.rs files to see examples, eg the Example that you linked.
As you notice: A special --template is used. This is the FRAME template and only really makes sense for Substrate itself. It produces a config dependent SubstrateWeight<T>, which third party down-stream projects like Polkadot can use. Instead of doing that they should rather benchmark themselves.
Using these default weights looks like this:

type SystemWeightInfo = frame_system::weights::SubstrateWeight<Runtime>;

Or when you are doing testing and just need some weight:

type WeightInfo = ();

Now if you are not in the Substrate repo but say in Polkadot: Looking at any of the runtime files you can see that it is not using any of the SubstrateWeight or () implementations. Rather it has its own weight definitions in the weights/ folder.
The Polkadot runtime then uses these weights here like this:

type WeightInfo = weights::pallet_balances::WeightInfo<Runtime>;

This is important, since weights are runtime-dependent. The WeightInfo trait is always the same though.
You can go even further and implement mocked weights.

Answer 2

I ended up using https://github.com/PureStake/moonbeam/blob/master/benchmarking/frame-weight-template.hbs as a template and followed the source, completly ignoring the official docs that seem to be a mashup of various conflicting versions.

Put it in /benchmarking and run this:

./target/release/your-node benchmark pallet --chain dev --pallet pallet_dao_core --extrinsic '*' --steps 20 --repeat 10 --output pallets/dao-core/src/weights.rs --template ./benchmarking/frame-weight-template.hbs

Then you can import the weights using

pub mod weights;
use weights::WeightInfo;

The upper template creates the correct Weights for testing:

/// For mocks rs
type WeightInfo = ();
/// For your runtime
type WeightInfo = pallet_your_pallet::weights::SubstrateWeight<Runtime>;

I stand being corrected, but the default used without a template is not usable.