Bench Press

Bench Press is a simple dsl around Ruby's Benchmark library.

Place the code you wish to benchmark inside of a measure block, run the bench_press command and you'll get a markdown report containing your system information and the realtime benchmark.

Additionally, benchmarks can be published to the Ruby Benchmark via bench_press --publish benchmark.rb command.

Creating a new benchmark

Use the --new flag to get started $ bench_press --new benchmark $ vi benchmark.rb

Example

# foo.rb
require 'bench_press'
extend BenchPress

base_string = ""
measure "string append" do
  base_string << "Hello World"
end

base_string = ""
measure "string +=" do
  base_string += "Hello World"
end

$ bench_press foo.rb

Foo
===
Date: August 05, 2010

System Information
------------------
    Operating System:    Mac OS X 10.6.4 (10F569)
    CPU:                 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
    Processor Count:     2
    Memory:              4 GB
    ruby 1.8.7 (2009-12-24 patchlevel 248) [i686-darwin10.2.0], MBARI 0x6770, Ruby Enterprise Edition 2010.01

"string append" is up to 71% faster over 1000 repetitions
---------------------------------------------------------

    string append    0.00270986557006836 secs    Fastest
    string +=        0.00948691368103027 secs    71% Slower

Details

The default number of repetitions is 1000 meaning each measure block is run 1000 times.

Each measure block is run in a forked subprocess in an attempt to isolate the memory usage per measurement. As of 0.3.0, the benchmark is run twice, the first run gets thrown away while the second run is added to the report.

Running the binary/examples locally

I use rubygems but this library is $LOAD_PATH friendly which means we need to set up our own load path when playing locally.

Try sourcing the .dev file

$ source .dev

Note on Patches/Pull Requests