python / python/pyperformance

Allow calculating geometric mean of groups of benchmarks based on tags

Open
#208 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
1k
Forks
203
Avg merge
1h 20m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

[Moved from https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/discussions/395]

It's becoming obvious that:

  • The pyperformance suite needs more benchmarks that are more similar to real-world workloads, and we should lean into optimizing for these and using these to report progress.
  • Microbenchmarks of a particular feature are also useful and belong in the benchmark suite, but we shouldn't over-optimize for them or use them as a (misleading) indicator of overall progress.

It seems that one way to address this would be to lean into "tags" more in the pyperformance/pyperf ecosystem. pyperformance already allows for tags in each benchmark's pyproject.yaml.

I propose we:

  1. Output the tags for each benchmark in the benchmark results in the metadata dictionary.
  2. pyperf compare_to would then calculate the geometric mean for each subset of benchmarks for each tag found in the results, as well as "all" benchmarks (existing behavior). This could be behind a flag if backward compatibility matters.

Alternatives:

We could instead use the nested benchmark heirarchy, rather than tags. Personally, I think tags is easier to understand and more flexible (a benchmark could be associated with multiple tags).

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing how benchmark tags from pyperformance's pyproject.yaml are represented in benchmark results and metadata, then inspect pyperf's compare_to flow. Done means tags are exposed in metadata and geometric means are calculated for each tag subset as well as all benchmarks, with backward-compatibility behavior resolved.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
performance, tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
32/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.