Benchmarking performance of your code between release versions

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 15:09:17 Z

A while ago in 2016 I posted a question on the BenchmarkDotNet repository about an official way to run benchmarks between Nuget releases. In 2018 I managed to find some time and with the with the help of Adam Sitnik (one of the project’s maintainers), was able to make that work!

I won’t go into detail about what BenchmarkDotNet is, but it’s a brilliant way to accurately run benchmarks against your code to see how it performs, how much memory is being used, etc…

With this new feature you can now easily see how your code changes effect performance between your releases.

Show me the code

Making this work is quite easy and there’s a quick start code snippet in the repo already. For the example below I’ll use ImageSharp as the library to be tested and we’ll see how well James and his team is doing with regards to improving it’s JPEG decoding performance.


[Config(typeof(Config))]
public class ImageTests
{
    private static readonly string _filePath = @"C:\temp\test.jpg";

    private class Config : ManualConfig
    {
        public Config()
        {
            var baseJob = Job.MediumRun.With(CsProjCoreToolchain.Current.Value);
            Add(baseJob.WithNuGet("SixLabors.ImageSharp", "1.0.0-beta0006").WithId("1.0.0-beta0006"));
            Add(baseJob.WithNuGet("SixLabors.ImageSharp", "1.0.0-beta0005").WithId("1.0.0-beta0005"));
            Add(baseJob.WithNuGet("SixLabors.ImageSharp", "1.0.0-beta0004").WithId("1.0.0-beta0004"));
        }
    }

    [Benchmark]
    public Size LoadJpg()
    {
        using (var img = Image.Load(_filePath))
        {
            var size = img.Size();
            return size;
        }
    }
}

The code above should seem pretty straightforward. It’s just setting up 3 BenchmarkDotNet jobs, each using a different version of the SixLabors.ImageSharp Nuget package. Then the actual benchmark test is loading in a JPEG extracting it’s size and returning it.

Running the benchmark is like running any other BenchmarkDotNet test, for example in a console app:


class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {   
        var summary = BenchmarkRunner.Run();
    }
}

The results

Method	Job	NuGetReferences	Mean	Error	StdDev
LoadJpg	1.0.0-beta0004	SixLabors.ImageSharp 1.0.0-beta0004	297.5 ms	142.8 ms	7.827 ms
LoadJpg	1.0.0-beta0005	SixLabors.ImageSharp 1.0.0-beta0005	202.9 ms	466.6 ms	25.577 ms
LoadJpg	1.0.0-beta0006	SixLabors.ImageSharp 1.0.0-beta0006	148.8 ms	107.8 ms	5.910 ms

Looks good! from the beta0004 release to the beta0006 release there’s almost twice the performance boost.

API Surface Area

There is one caveat though… In order to run these tests between versions of your library, the same API surface area will need to exist otherwise you’ll get exceptions when running the benchmarks. This is the reason why versions beta0001 –> beta0003 are not included in the jobs listed above. Its because in the older versions either the APIs were different or the namespaces were different.

It is possible to work around this but you’d need to use some ugly reflection to do it and then you need to be careful that you are not testing the reflection performance hit either.

Now you should have a pretty easy way to know how the performance of your library is changing between versions. Happy coding!

Umbraco 4.1 Benchmarks Part 2 (Back Office Database Queries)

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 15:08:14 Z

This post was imported from FARMCode.org which has been discontinued. These posts now exist here as an archive. They may contain broken links and images.

This is part 2 in a series of Umbraco 4.1 benchmarks created by various members of the core team in the lead up to launch. See Part 1 here on request/response peformance in the Umbraco back office.

This benchmark report looks at the data layer improvements in 4.1 by comparing query counts in 4.1 to 4.0.3. Not only has the data layer improved but there’s been significant improvements in the consumption of the data layer API made by many of the 4.1 pages and controls.

The stats below are represented as a percentage of the total calls of 4.0.3 where the number of queries in 4.0.3 are 100% and the number of queries in 4.1 are a percentage in relation to this. These results are based on the procedures listed at the bottom of this post and on averages run over 3 separate trials.

Step	4.0.3	4.1.0
Login	100%	68%
Expand all Content nodes	100%	23%
Edit Home node	100%	49%
Publishing Home node	100%	55%
Edit About Umbraco node	100%	49%
Go to Settings App	100%	100%
Expand Document types tree	100%	100%
Edit Home document type	100%	61%
Save Home document type	100%	67%
Go to Media app	100%	50%
Create new folder labeled ‘Test’	100%	88%
Create new image under new ‘Test’ folder labeled ‘test1’	100%	64%
Upload new image file to ‘test1’ and save the node	100%	49%
Go to Content app (and in the case of 4.0.3, expand the tree and select the About Umbraco node since in 4.1 this will already be selected and loaded)	100%	41%
Edit Home node	100%	43%
Add ‘test1’ image to the ‘Text’ WYSIWYG property with the image picker and Publish node	100%	49%
Average of averages above		60%
Complete run through of the above steps	100%	66%

So based on averages, Umbraco 4.1 is looking to have around 40% less queries made than 4.0.3!!! Thats HUGE!

The following steps were taken on each trial of the above steps:

New instances of both 4.0.3 and 4.1
Install CWS package on both instances
Log out of both instances
Bump web.config for both instances (clear out all data cache)
Use SQL Profiler to determine query counts for each step listed above

Also, SQL debugging has been added to 4.1 for MS SQL instances. If you compile the source in Debug mode you can get the SQL command output by adding a trace listener to your web.config. Underneath the configuration node you can add this xml block:

<system.diagnostics>
	<trace autoflush="true">
	  <listeners>
		<add name="SqlListener" 
			type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" 
			initializeData="trace.log" />
	  </listeners>
	</trace>
</system.diagnostics>

This will create a trace.log file in the root of your web app SQL debugging.

Shazwazza

Benchmarking performance of your code between release versions

Show me the code

The results

API Surface Area

Umbraco 4.1 Benchmarks Part 2 (Back Office Database Queries)