NAME

benchmark-perlformance - Frontend for Benchmark::Perl::Formance

SYNOPSIS

Usage:

$ benchmark-perlformance
$ benchmark-perlformance --plugins=SpamAssassin,Fib,Rx
$ benchmark-perlformance --plugins=SpamAssassin,Fib,Rx -q
$ benchmark-perlformance --plugins=SpamAssassin,Fib,Rx -v
$ benchmark-perlformance --plugins=SpamAssassin,Fib,Rx -vv -ccccc

If run directly it uses the perl in your PATH:

$ /path/to/benchmark-perlformance

To use another Perl start it via

$ /other/path/to/bin/perl /path/to/benchmark-perlformance

To provide configuration, general and plugin specific, you can use the -D option to define key/value pairs:

$ benchmark-perlformance -DShootout_fasta_n=5500  [...]

Plugins usually follow the convention that the options are prefixed with the plugin name, like in the example it means the config value n used by the plugin Shootout::fasta.

ABOUT

This is the frontend commandline tool for starting the performance benchmark runs.

After running it prints out the results which you can take to compare them to runs with other Perl versions, other architectures, different compile time configuration or on different machines.

OPTIONS

There are some options available.

--help

-h

prints out a help page.

--plugins=SpamAssassin,Fib,Rx

Use only a particular list of sub benchmarks. The comma-separated list refers to Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::* respectively.

If you provide --plugins=ALL then all known plugins will be tried.

If you do not provide the --plugins option then a default list of "mostly harmless" plugins is used which should work with the same dependencies of Benchmark::Perl::Formance itself (currently: DPath, Fib, FibOO, Mem, Prime, Rx, Shootout::{fasta, regexdna, binarytrees, revcomp, nbody, spectralnorm}).

--outstyle=summary

This enables a condensed tabular output instead of YAML. Default since v0.10.

--outstyle=yaml

This activates YAML formatted output.

--fastmode

If this is set then some plugins try to scale down the stress to take less time (with less useful results, of course). Mostly for easier development.

--stabilize-cpu

Runs an external utility script (benchmark-perlformance-set-stable-system) which stabilizes the system to get less deviation on multiple runs.

The system is stabilized using:

• Disable address space randomization (ASLR)

  See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features

• Set maximum frequency of all cpus to minimum frequency

  Therefore the system can't scale down further unexpectedly, e.g. when it gets hot.

• Drop caches

  See http://linux-mm.org/Drop_Caches.

• Classical disk sync

  Flush file system buffers, see man 1 sync.

The external utility script is called via sudo - please configure your sudo in advance to suit your needs, e.g. to not ask for password. An alternative approach is to run benchmark-perlformance-set-stable-system lo once when your system boots, like from /etc/init.d/ (and run your cpu slow all the time, obviously).

Be careful: maybe the cpu is not restored perfectly after a run, e.g., due to crashes during the benchmarking, or the values are not the very same. This could make your next results without --stabilize-cpu inconclusive. Reboot your system to ensure a clean state or use --stabilize-cpu all the time.

--version

Print Benchmark::Perl::Formance version. In conjunction with -v it prints out all available plugins with version.

--verbose

-v

-vv

-vvv

-vvvv

-vvvvv

Increases the verbosity level during the run of the benchmarks. Default is only print the result (and maybe some output from external tools).

To increase the number of keys from your Perl Config that are included in the result use one or more -c options.

Please note that only one single -v is not enough to see errors that occur when trying to load a plugin. They are only marked as "skipped". Use -vv to see the error message; -vvv for progress information; -vvvv or more should be used for debugging info.

-q

Be quiet; do not output results.

--showconfig

-c

Gives you the most basic information like Perl version, operating system name and architecture, i.e., perlpath, version, archname, archname64, osvers.

-cc

Adds gccversion, gnulibc_version, usemymalloc, config_args, optimize.

-ccc

Adds ccflags, ccname, cccdlflags, ccdlflags, cppflags, nm_so_opt.

-cccc

Adds about 40 more keys from Perl's %Config hash - everything that sounds like it could either influence performance between different hardware, configurations, and compilers, or interesting meta information around that.

-ccccc

Includes all info from Perl's %Config hash.

-p

Includes platform info via Devel::Platform::Info

(Users who want to greet the 80s combine it this way: -cccp. :-)

--tapdescription="some description"

When given this will prepend the YAML with a TAP line

ok some description

This makes it easier for wrappers to embed the output into TAP which otherwise need to differentiate between output (verbose and other) and the YAML.

--indent=2

This indents the whole yaml output by some spaces (2 in the example). Together with --tapdescription it makes an TAP v13 style structured diagnostics block which can, for instance, be evaluated using TAP::DOM.

--useforks

By setting this you can activate the forks drop-in replacement for threads.

See Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::Threads.

-Dkey=value

With this you can configure some plugins by defining key/value pairs.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

There are some options available.

PERLFORMANCE_SALEARN

See Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::SpamAssassin. Contains the path to the "sa-learn" executable.

PERLFORMANCE_THREADCOUNT

See Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::Threads. Use this many count of threads. Default is 16.

PLUGINS

Please read the documentation for the used plugins, as they might accept special configuration, usually via -Dkey=value options.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::SpamAssassin

Run Bayes learning tools from SpamAssassin.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::Rx

Stress using Perl6/Perl5 tools around STD.pm

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::DPath

Use DPath to stress lookup, traversing and copying data structures.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::Rx

Regular expressions, basic functions and pathological regex stressing.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::RxCmp

Compare differnet regex engines (pluggable since Perl 5.10).

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::Fib

Fibonnacci numbers to stress recursion and function calls.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::FibOO

Fibonnacci numbers to stress recursion and method calls, with plain Perl OO.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::FibMoose

Fibonnacci numbers to stress recursion and method calls, with Moose.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::FibMouse

Fibonnacci numbers to stress recursion and method calls, with Mouse.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::FibMXDeclare

Fibonnacci numbers to stress recursion and method calls, with MooseX::Declare.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::Threads

Thread handling.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::Shootout

Runs some Perl benchmarks from the Language Shootout on alioth.debian.org.

Benchmark::Perl::Formance::Plugin::P6STD

Runs tools from Perl6 STD world.

AUTHOR

Steffen Schwigon <ss5@renormalist.net>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2015 by Steffen Schwigon.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.