Various aspects of the Coin runtime behaviour can be controlled through setting different environment variables to some value.

Most of these variables are there for debugging and problem-workaround purposes, but a few are for telling Coin where to locate external resource files.

Here we will set up a list of some of the environment variables Coin will check for and can alter behavior because of.

Scene Graph Profiler

The scene graph profiler subsystem uses the following environment variables:

COIN_PROFILER
COIN_PROFILER_OVERLAY

A lot of other environment variables will also affect the profiling and listing them all would be tedious. Most useful is perhaps the IV_SEPARATOR_MAX_CACHES variable for disabling caching, and those that disable features like vertex arrays and frame buffer objects, but using these will of course cause you to profile special cases that may not be as important as you might think.