GitHub - sharkdp/hyperfine: A command-line benchmarking tool (original) (raw)
hyperfine
A command-line benchmarking tool.
Demo: Benchmarking fd andfind:
Sponsors
A special thank you goes to our biggest sponsor:
Warp, the intelligent terminal Available on MacOS, Linux, Windows
Features
- Statistical analysis across multiple runs.
- Support for arbitrary shell commands.
- Constant feedback about the benchmark progress and current estimates.
- Warmup runs can be executed before the actual benchmark.
- Cache-clearing commands can be set up before each timing run.
- Statistical outlier detection to detect interference from other programs and caching effects.
- Export results to various formats: CSV, JSON, Markdown, AsciiDoc.
- Parameterized benchmarks (e.g. vary the number of threads).
- Cross-platform
Usage
Basic benchmarks
To run a benchmark, you can simply call hyperfine <command>.... The argument(s) can be any shell command. For example:
Hyperfine will automatically determine the number of runs to perform for each command. By default, it will perform at least 10 benchmarking runs and measure for at least 3 seconds. To change this, you can use the -r/--runs option:
hyperfine --runs 5 'sleep 0.3'
If you want to compare the runtimes of different programs, you can pass multiple commands:
hyperfine 'hexdump file' 'xxd file'
Warmup runs and preparation commands
For programs that perform a lot of disk I/O, the benchmarking results can be heavily influenced by disk caches and whether they are cold or warm.
If you want to run the benchmark on a warm cache, you can use the -w/--warmup option to perform a certain number of program executions before the actual benchmark:
hyperfine --warmup 3 'grep -R TODO *'
Conversely, if you want to run the benchmark for a cold cache, you can use the -p/--prepareoption to run a special command before each timing run. For example, to clear harddisk caches on Linux, you can run
sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To use this specific command with hyperfine, call sudo -v to temporarily gain sudo permissions and then call:
hyperfine --prepare 'sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' 'grep -R TODO *'
Parameterized benchmarks
If you want to run a series of benchmarks where a single parameter is varied (say, the number of threads), you can use the -P/--parameter-scan option and call:
hyperfine --prepare 'make clean' --parameter-scan num_threads 1 12 'make -j {num_threads}'
This also works with decimal numbers. The -D/--parameter-step-size option can be used to control the step size:
hyperfine --parameter-scan delay 0.3 0.7 -D 0.2 'sleep {delay}'
This runs sleep 0.3, sleep 0.5 and sleep 0.7.
For non-numeric parameters, you can also supply a list of values with the -L/--parameter-listoption:
hyperfine -L compiler gcc,clang '{compiler} -O2 main.cpp'
Intermediate shell
By default, commands are executed using a predefined shell (/bin/sh on Unix, cmd.exe on Windows). If you want to use a different shell, you can use the -S, --shell <SHELL> option:
hyperfine --shell zsh 'for i in {1..10000}; do echo test; done'
Note that hyperfine always corrects for the shell spawning time. To do this, it performs a calibration procedure where it runs the shell with an empty command (multiple times), to measure the startup time of the shell. It will then subtract this time from the total to show the actual time used by the command in question.
If you want to run a benchmark without an intermediate shell, you can use the -N or --shell=noneoption. This is helpful for very fast commands (< 5 ms) where the shell startup overhead correction would produce a significant amount of noise. Note that you cannot use shell syntax like * or ~ in this case.
hyperfine -N 'grep TODO /home/user'
Shell functions and aliases
If you are using bash, you can export shell functions to directly benchmark them with hyperfine:
my_function() { sleep 1; } export -f my_function hyperfine --shell=bash my_function
Otherwise, inline them into or source them from the benchmarked program:
hyperfine 'my_function() { sleep 1; }; my_function'
echo 'alias my_alias="sleep 1"' > /tmp/my_alias.sh hyperfine '. /tmp/my_alias.sh; my_alias'
Exporting results
Hyperfine has multiple options for exporting benchmark results to CSV, JSON, Markdown and other formats (see --help text for details).
Markdown
You can use the --export-markdown <file> option to create tables like the following:
| Command | Mean [s] | Min [s] | Max [s] | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| find . -iregex '.*[0-9]\.jpg$' | 2.275 ± 0.046 | 2.243 | 2.397 | 9.79 ± 0.22 |
| find . -iname '*[0-9].jpg' | 1.427 ± 0.026 | 1.405 | 1.468 | 6.14 ± 0.13 |
| fd -HI '.*[0-9]\.jpg$' | 0.232 ± 0.002 | 0.230 | 0.236 | 1.00 |
JSON
The JSON output is useful if you want to analyze the benchmark results in more detail. Thescripts/ folder includes a lot of helpful Python programs to further analyze benchmark results and create helpful visualizations, like a histogram of runtimes or a whisker plot to compare multiple benchmarks:
 |
 |
|---|
Detailed benchmark flowchart
The following chart explains the execution order of various timing runs when using options like --warmup, --prepare <cmd>, --setup <cmd> or --cleanup <cmd>:
Installation
On Ubuntu
Download the appropriate .deb package from the Release pageand install it via dpkg:
wget https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine/releases/download/v1.19.0/hyperfine_1.19.0_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i hyperfine_1.19.0_amd64.deb
On Fedora
On Fedora, hyperfine can be installed from the official repositories:
On Alpine Linux
On Alpine Linux, hyperfine can be installed from the official repositories:
On Arch Linux
On Arch Linux, hyperfine can be installed from the official repositories:
On Debian Linux
On Debian Linux, hyperfine can be installed from the testing repositories:
On Exherbo Linux
On Exherbo Linux, hyperfine can be installed from the rust repositories:
cave resolve -x repository/rust
cave resolve -x hyperfine
On Funtoo Linux
On Funtoo Linux, hyperfine can be installed from core-kit:
emerge app-benchmarks/hyperfine
On NixOS
On NixOS, hyperfine can be installed from the official repositories:
On Flox
On Flox, hyperfine can be installed as follows.
Hyperfine's version in Flox follows that of Nix.
On openSUSE
On openSUSE, hyperfine can be installed from the official repositories:
On Void Linux
Hyperfine can be installed via xbps
xbps-install -S hyperfine
On macOS
Hyperfine can be installed via Homebrew:
Or you can install using MacPorts:
sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install hyperfine
On FreeBSD
Hyperfine can be installed via pkg:
On OpenBSD
On Windows
Hyperfine can be installed via Chocolatey, Scoop, or Winget:
With conda
Hyperfine can be installed via conda from the conda-forge channel:
conda install -c conda-forge hyperfine
With cargo (Linux, macOS, Windows)
Hyperfine can be installed from source via cargo:
cargo install --locked hyperfine
Make sure that you use Rust 1.76 or newer.
From binaries (Linux, macOS, Windows)
Download the corresponding archive from the Release page.
Alternative tools
Hyperfine is inspired by bench.
Integration with other tools
Chronologer is a tool that uses hyperfine to visualize changes in benchmark timings across your Git history.
Bencher is a continuous benchmarking tool that supports hyperfine to track benchmarks and catch performance regressions in CI.
Drop hyperfine JSON outputs onto the Venz chart to visualize the results, and manage hyperfine configurations.
Make sure to check out the scripts folderin this repository for a set of tools to work with hyperfine benchmark results.
Origin of the name
The name hyperfine was chosen in reference to the hyperfine levels of caesium 133 which play a crucial role in thedefinition of our base unit of time— the second.
Citing hyperfine
Thank you for considering to cite hyperfine in your research work. Please see the information in the sidebar on how to properly cite hyperfine.
License
hyperfine is dual-licensed under the terms of the MIT License and the Apache License 2.0.
See the LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT files for details.