Astropy performance benchmarks

About

These benchmarks track the performance of various features in astropy over time.

To view them, visit this site.

The benchmarks are run using airspeed velocity.

Contributing a benchmark

To add a benchmark, fork this repository and take a look inside the benchmarks folder - each module in astropy that already has benchmarks has a corresponding file or directory with files for different parts of the module. Either add your benchmark to one of the existing files or create a new file as needed.

A benchmark is a Python function whose name starts with time_. A function should test as little as possible and therefore be as short/simple as possible. Any required imports should be done outside the function. Here is an example of a benchmark to test unit conversion:

from astropy import units as u

def time_my_benchmark():
    (u.m / u.s).to(u.km / u.h)

Once you have added a benchmark, you can make sure it runs by installing asv with:

pip install asv

and running the following in the astropy-benchmarks folder:

asv dev

This will run all the benchmarks in fast mode (running each function once) using the installed version of Astropy. This is just to make sure that the benchmarks run properly, and the timings should not be considered accurate.

To run a single benchmark, you can do e.g.:

asv dev --bench time_my_benchmark

Once you are happy with your benchmarks, open a pull request to the astropy-benchmarks repository.

You do not need to add any result files for the benchmarks - we have machines that automatically do this every night.

Notes to maintainers

The master branch in this repository should not contain any results or built website. Results should be added to the results branch, and commits to the results branch trigger a build to the gh-pages branch.