Easy Bench

A quick and easy benchmarking library for Ruby. Useful for benchmarking only part of an iteration, and accumulating the data to report later in the code.

Features:

• Measure the call times of only some of the expressions in your interation -- the timer is explicitly started and stopped for the duration of a block.
• The result of the operation inside then benchmarked block is returned from the benchmarking call, so an EasyBench call can be wrapped around existing code with no changes.
• This style allows for interleaving of two or more alternatives being benchmarked within an interaction, which can correct for ramp-up effects you might see if you benchmarked the alternatives sequentially.
• Simple report output shows minimum, maximum, and mean call times.
• The report output can also include a simple bar chart to visually inspect the data for outliners (only really useful for small runs of 20 iterations or so)

$ sudo gem install easy_bench

Will also install the Sometimes Memoize gem.

A simple benchmark:

eb = EasyBench.new('Sleeping')

1.upto(10).each do |i|

  eb.caller{sleep(i.to_f / 10)}

end

eb.stats #=> {:count=>10, :total=>5.501514, :min=>0.100154, :max=>1.000172, :mean=>0.5501514000000001}

eb.report(true) # prints a report and simple bar chart as below

Sample report:

Sleeping

num runs       : 10
total run time : 5.501514s
min run time   : 0.100154s
max run time   : 1.000172s
ave run time   : 0.5501514000000001s

                  *
              * * *
          * * * * *
      * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * *

Interleaving:

eb1 = EasyBench.new('Old Way')
eb2 = EasyBench.new('New Way')

10000.times do

  eb1.caller{ SlowDB.call }
  eb2.caller{ HopefullyFasterDB.call }

end

eb1.report
eb2.report