Benchy

A lightweight benchmarking framework written in Python focused on performing memory consumption and runtime performance comparison for Python programs.

The goal of this framework is to help scientific developers to perform benchmarkings of several algorithmical approaches written in Python.

It's has the memory_profiler , numpy and matplotlib as dependencies.

Installation

To install through easy_install or pip:

$ easy_install -U benchy # pip install -U benchy

To install from source, download the package, extract and type:

$ python setup.py install

Usage

To use the benchy framework, you must first define the functions you would like to benchmark. In this example, we create three versions of a simple function create_list that allocates the list a with 100000 elements:

from benchy.api import Benchmark

common_setup = ""
statement = "lst = ['i' for x in range(100000)]"
benchmark1 = Benchmark(statement, common_setup, name= "range")

statement = "lst = ['i' for x in xrange(100000)]"
benchmark2 = Benchmark(statement, common_setup, name= "xrange")

statement = "lst = ['i'] * 100000"
benchmark3 = Benchmark(statement, common_setup, name= "range")

With all benchmarks created, we could test a simple benchmark by calling the method run:

print benchmark1.run()

The output will follow the structure below:

{'memory': {'repeat': 3,
            'success': True,
            'units': 'MB',
            'usage': 2.97265625},
 'runtime': {'loops': 100,
             'repeat': 3,
             'success': True,
             'timing': 7.5653696060180664,
             'units': 'ms'}}

The dict associated to the key memory represents the memory performance results. It gives you the number of calls repeat to the statement, the average consumption usage in units . In addition, the key 'runtime' indicates the runtime performance in timing results. It presents the number of calls repeat following the average time to execute it timing in units.

Do you want see a more presentable output ? It is possible calling the method to_rst with the results as parameter:

rst_text = benchmark1.to_rst(results)

The output

Benchmark setup

Benchmark statement

lst = ['c' for x in range(100000)]

name	repeat	timing	loops	units
list with range	3	6.739	100	ms

Now let's check which one is faster and which one consumes less memory. Let's create a BenchmarkSuite. It is referred as a container for benchmarks.:

from benchy.api import BenchmarkSuite
suite = BenchmarkSuite()
suite.append(benchmark1)
suite.append(benchmark2)
suite.append(benchmark3)

Finally, let's run all the benchmarks together with the BenchmarkRunner. This class can load all the benchmarks from the suite and run each individual analysis and print out interesting reports:

from benchy.api import BenchmarkRunner
runner = BenchmarkRunner(benchmarks=suite, tmp_dir='.', name= 'List Allocation Benchmark')

Let's run the suite:

n_benchs, results = runner.run()

Output will follow:

{Benchmark('list with "*"'):
    {'runtime': {'timing': 0.47582697868347168, 'repeat': 3, 'success': True, 'loops': 1000, 'timeBaselines': 1.0, 'units': 'ms'},
    'memory': {'usage': 0.3828125, 'units': 'MB', 'repeat': 3, 'success': True}},

Benchmark('list with xrange'):
    {'runtime': {'timing': 5.623779296875, 'repeat': 3, 'success': True, 'loops': 100, 'timeBaselines': 11.818958463504936, 'units': 'ms'},
    'memory': {'usage': 0.71484375, 'units': 'MB', 'repeat': 3, 'success': True}},

Benchmark('list with range'): {
    'runtime': {'timing': 6.5933513641357422, 'repeat': 3, 'success': True, 'loops': 100, 'timeBaselines': 13.856615239384636, 'units': 'ms'},
    'memory': {'usage': 2.2109375, 'units': 'MB', 'repeat': 3, 'success': True}}}

Next, we will plot the relative timings. It is important to measure how faster the other benchmarks are compared to reference one. By calling the method plot_relative:

def plot_relative(self, results, ref_bench=None, fig=None,
                horizontal=True, colors=list('bgrcmyk'), logy=False):
    """Relative plot.
        Parameters:
        -----------
        results: The benchmark results from BenchmarkRunner.
        ref_bench: The Benchmark object that will be the baseline, optional
        fig: matplotlib figure object, optional
        horizontal: The plot will be horizontal or vertical, optional
        colors:  the colormap for the plots, optional
        logy:  log scale, optional

        Returns:
        --------
        fig: matplotlib figure
    """
    ...

Going back to the list allocation, let's save the plot:

fig = runner.plot_relative(results, horizontal=True)
plt.savefig('%s_r.png' % runner.name, bbox_inches='tight')

As you can see the graph aboe the xrange method is 12x slower and the range approach is 13x. Let's see the absolute timings. Just call the method ``plot_absolute`:

def plot_absolute(self, results, fig=None, horizontal=True,
        colors=list('bgrcmyk'), logy=False):
    """Absolute Timing plot.
        Parameters:
        -----------
        results: The benchmark results from BenchmarkRunner.
        fig: matplotlib figure object, optional
        horizontal: The plot will be horizontal or vertical, optional
        colors:  the colormap for the plots, optional
        logy:  log scale, optional

        Returns:
        --------
        fig: matplotlib figure
    """
    ...

Showing the plot now:

runner.plot_absolute(results, horizontal=False)
plt.savefig('%s.png' % runner.name) # bbox_inches='tight')

You may notice besides the bar representing the timings, the line plot representing the memory consumption for each statement. There is a positive correlation between the memory consumption and the runtime performance.

Finally, benchy also provides a full repport for all benchmarks by calling the method to_rst:

rst_text = runner.to_rst(results, runner.name + 'png',
        runner.name + '_r.png')
with open('teste.rst', 'w') as f:
        f.write(rst_text)

The expected output (the configuration I added manually):

Performance Benchmarks

These historical benchmark graphs were produced with benchy.

Produced on a machine with

• Intel Core i5 950 processor
• Mac Os 10.6
• Python 2.6.5 64-bit
• NumPy 1.6.1

list with "*"

Benchmark setup

Benchmark statement

lst = ['c'] * 100000

name	repeat	timing	loops	units
list with "*"	3	0.4788	1000	ms

list with xrange

Benchmark setup

Benchmark statement

lst = ['c' for x in xrange(100000)]

name	repeat	timing	loops	units
list with xrange	3	5.772	100	ms

list with range

Benchmark setup

Benchmark statement

lst = ['c' for x in range(100000)]

name	repeat	timing	loops	units
list with range	3	7.037	100	ms

Final Results

name	repeat	timing	loops	units	timeBaselines
list with "*"	3	0.4788	1000	ms	1
list with xrange	3	5.772	100	ms	12.05
list with range	3	7.037	100	ms	14.7

Performance Relative graph

Performance Absolute graph

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: How accurate are the results ?
• A: This module gets the memory consumption by querying the operating system kernel about the amount of memory the current process has allocated, which might be slightly different from the amount of memory that is actually used by the Python interpreter. Also, because of how the garbage collector works in Python the result might be different between platforms and even between runs. The runtime performance is obtained by calling the python standard library timeit module. So it also can lead to different results between platforms and even runs.
• Q: Does it work under windows ?
• A: I didn't test yet. It will be a issue in the Github's issue tracker.

Support, bugs & wish list

Send issues, proposals, etc. to github's issue tracker .

If you've got questions regarding development, you can email me directly at marcel@pingmind.com

Development

Latest sources are available from github:

https://github.com/python-recsys/benchy

Authors

This module was written by Marcel Caraciolo

Inspired by Wes Mckinney vbench.

License

Simplified BSD