[Python-Dev] performance testing recommendations in devguide (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed May 29 21🔞01 CEST 2013

Hi,

On Wed, 29 May 2013 12:00:44 -0600 Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com> wrote:

The devguide doesn't have anything on performance testing that I could find.

See http://bugs.python.org/issue17449

Tools I'm aware of: * pybench (relatively limited in real-world usefulness) * timeit module (for quick comparisions) * benchmarks repo (real-world performance test suite) * speed.python.org (would omit for now)

Things to test: * speed * memory (tools? tests?)

You can use the "-m" option to perf.py.

Critically sensitive performance subjects * interpreter start-up time

There are startup tests in the benchmark suite.

* module import overhead * attribute lookup overhead (including MRO traversal) * function call overhead * instance creation overhead * dict performance (the underlying namespace type) * tuple performance (packing/unpacking, integral container type) * string performance

These are all micro-benchmark fodder rather than high-level concerns (e.g. "startup time" is a high-level concern potentially impacted by "module import overhead", but only if the latter is a significant contributor to startup time).

How do we avoid performance regressions?

Right now we don't have any automated way to detect them.

Regards

Antoine.

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