On Feb 26, 2013, at 10:05 AM, Peter Westlake
On Sun, Jan 6, 2013, at 20:22, exarkun@twistedmatrix.com wrote:
On 12:48 am, peter.westlake@pobox.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 4, 2013, at 19:58, exarkun@twistedmatrix.com wrote: ... Codespeed cannot handle more than one result per benchmark.
The `timeit` module is probably not suitable to use to collect the data ..... What method would you prefer?
Something simple and accurate. :) You may need to do some investigation to determine the best approach.
1. This is simple:
def do_benchmark(content): t1 = time.time() d = flatten(request, content, lambda _: None) t2 = time.time() assert d.called return t2 - t1
Do you think it's acceptably accurate? After a few million iterations, the relative error should be pretty small.
Well it rather depends on the contents of 'content', doesn't it? :) I think we have gotten lost in the weeds here. We talked about using benchlib.py initially, and then you noticed a bug, and it was mentioned that benchlib.py was mostly written for testing asynchronous things and didn't have good support for testing the simple case here, which is synchronous rendering of a simple document. However, one of twisted.web.template's major features - arguably its reason for existing in a world that is practically overrun by HTML templating systems - is that it supports Deferreds. So we'll want that anyway. The right thing to do here would be to update benchlib itself with a few simple tools for doing timing of synchronous tasks, and possibly also to just fix the unbounded-recursion bug that you noticed, not to start building a new, parallel set of testing tools which use different infrastructure. That probably means implementing a small subset of timeit.
2. For the choice of test data, I had a quick search for benchmarks from other web frameworks. All I found was "hello world" benchmarks, that test the overhead of the framework itself by rendering an empty page. I'll include that, of course.
"hello world" benchmarks have problems because start-up overhead tends to dominate. A realistic web page with some slots and renderers sprinkled throughout would be a lot better. Although even better would be a couple of cases - let's say small, large-sync, and large-async - so we can see if optimizations for one case hurt another. As Jean-Paul already mentioned in this thread, you can't have more than one result per benchmark, so you'll need to choose a fixed number of configurations and create one benchmark for each.
3. Regarding option parsing, is there any reason to prefer twisted.python.usage.Options over [...]
The reason to prefer usage.Options is consistency. That's what we use on Twisted, and there is no compelling reason to use something else. In any case, if there were a compelling reason to use something else, this wouldn't be the place to start; you could start a separate discussion about option parsing. (Warning; a discussion about option parsing would inevitably be a waste of everyone's time and you should under no circumstances do this.) All the options that you might need to parse (well, all the options that you _can_ parse, as far as codespeed is concerned) are already implemented by benchlib.py in http://launchpad.net/twisted-benchmarks, so there's no point in writing any option-parsing code for this task anyway. The thing to implement would be a different driver() function that makes a few simple synchronous calls without running the reactor. -glyph