Benchmarking tools for the Faster CPython project

Usage

This code lets you set up your own Github repo to run pyperformance benchmarks on your own self-hosted Github Action runners.

For example, you can see the Faster CPython team's benchmarking results.

Set up the repo

Create a new empty repository on Github and clone it locally.

Add bench_runner to your requirements.txt. Since there are no PyPI releases (yet), you can install it from a tag in the git repo:

git+https://github.com/faster-cpython/bench_runner@v0.2.2#egg=bench_runner

Create a virtual environment and install your requirements to it, for example:

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the install script to generate the files to make the Github Actions work (from the root of your repo):

python -m bench_runner install

This will create some files in .github/workflows as well as some configuration files at the root of your repo. Commit them to your repository, and push up to Github.

git commit -a -m "Initial commit"
git push origin main

Add some self-hosted runners

Provision the machine to have the build requirements for CPython and the base requirements for Github Actions according to the provisioning instructions.

Then, add it to the pool of runners by following the instructions on Github's Settings -> Actions -> Runners -> Add New Runner to add a new runner.

The default responses to all questions should be fine except pay careful attention to set the labels correctly. Each runner must have the following labels:

• One of linux, macos or windows.
• bare-metal (to distinguish it from VMs in the cloud).
• $os-$arch-$nickname, where:
  • $os is one of linux, macos, windows
  • $arch is one of x86_64 or arm64 (others may be supported in future)
  • $nickname is a unique nickname for the runner.

Once the runner is set up, enable it as a service so it will start automatically on boot.

In addition, the metadata about the runner must be added to runners.ini, for example:

[linux]
os = linux
arch = x86_64
hostname = pyperf

TODO: Describe the special pystats runner

Try a benchmarking run

There are instructions for running a benchmarking action already in the README.md of your repo. Look there and give it a try!

Configuration

Set of benchmarks

By default, all of the benchmarks in pyperformance and python-macrobenchmarks are run. To configure the set of benchmarks, or add more, edit the benchmarks.manifest file. The format of this file is documented with pyperformance.

Reference versions

All benchmarked commits are automatically compared to key "reference" versions, as well as their merge base, if available.

The reference versions are defined in the bases.txt file.

Don't forget to actually collect benchmark data for those tags -- it's doesn't happen automatically.

Longitudinal plot

TODO: The longitudinal plot isn't currently configurable.

Developer

To learn how to hack on this project, see the full developer documentation.