Writing benchmarks¶

Benchmarks are stored in a Python package, i.e. collection of .py files in the benchmark suite’s benchmark directory (as defined by benchmark_dir in the asv.conf.json file). The package may contain arbitrarily nested subpackages, contents of which will also be used, regardless of the file names.

Within each .py file, each benchmark is a function or method. The name of the function must have a special prefix, depending on the type of benchmark. asv understands how to handle the prefix in either CamelCase or lowercase with underscores. For example, to create a timing benchmark, the following are equivalent:

def time_range():
    for i in range(1000):
        pass

def TimeRange():
    for i in range(1000):
        pass

Benchmarks may be organized into methods of classes if desired:

class Suite:
    def time_range(self):
        for i in range(1000):
            pass

    def time_xrange(self):
        for i in xrange(1000):
            pass

Running benchmarks during development¶

There are some options to asv run that may be useful when writing benchmarks.

You may find that asv run spends a lot of time setting up the environment each time. You can have asv run use an existing Python environment that already has the benchmarked project and all of its dependencies installed. Use the --python argument to specify a Python environment to use:

asv run --python=python

If you don’t care about getting accurate timings, but just want to ensure the code is running, you can add the --quick argument, which will run each benchmark only once:

asv run --quick

In order to display the standard error output (this includes exception tracebacks) that your benchmarks may produce, pass the --show-stderr flag:

asv run --show-stderr

Finally, there is a special command, asv dev, that uses all of these features and is equivalent to:

asv run --python=same --quick --show-stderr --dry-run

You may also want to only do a basic check whether the benchmark suite is well-formatted, without actually running any benchmarks:

asv check --python=same

Setup and teardown functions¶

If initialization needs to be performed that should not be included in the timing of the benchmark, include that code in a setup method on the class, or add an attribute called setup to a free function.

For example:

class Suite:
    def setup(self):
        # load data from a file
        with open("/usr/share/words.txt", "r") as fd:
            self.words = fd.readlines()

    def time_upper(self):
        for word in self.words:
            word.upper()

# or equivalently...

words = []
def my_setup():
    global words
    with open("/usr/share/words.txt", "r") as fd:
        words = fd.readlines()

def time_upper():
    for word in words:
        word.upper()
time_upper.setup = my_setup

You can also include a module-level setup function, which will be run for every benchmark within the module, prior to any setup assigned specifically to each function.

Similarly, benchmarks can also have a teardown function that is run after the benchmark. This is useful if, for example, you need to clean up any changes made to the filesystem.

Note that although different benchmarks run in separate processes, for a given benchmark repeated measurement (cf. repeat attribute) and profiling occur within the same process. For these cases, the setup and teardown routines are run multiple times in the same process.

If setup raises a NotImplementedError, the benchmark is marked as skipped.

The setup method is run multiple times, for each benchmark and for each repeat. If the setup is especially expensive, the setup_cache method may be used instead, which only performs the setup calculation once and then caches the result to disk. It is run only once also for repeated benchmarks and profiling, unlike setup. setup_cache can persist the data for the benchmarks it applies to in two ways:

Returning a data structure, which asv pickles to disk, and then loads and passes it as the first argument to each benchmark.
Saving files to the current working directory (which is a temporary directory managed by asv) which are then explicitly loaded in each benchmark process. It is probably best to load the data in a setup method so the loading time is not included in the timing of the benchmark.

A separate cache is used for each environment and each commit of the project begin tested and is thrown out between benchmark runs.

For example, caching data in a pickle:

class Suite:
    def setup_cache(self):
        fib = [1, 1]
        for i in range(100):
            fib.append(fib[-2] + fib[-1])
        return fib

    def track_fib(self, fib):
        return fib[-1]

As another example, explicitly saving data in a file:

class Suite:
    def setup_cache(self):
        with open("test.dat", "wb") as fd:
            for i in range(100):
                fd.write('{0}\n'.format(i))

    def setup(self):
        with open("test.dat", "rb") as fd:
            self.data = [int(x) for x in fd.readlines()]

    def track_numbers(self):
        return len(self.data)

The setup_cache timeout can be specified by setting the .timeout attribute of the setup_cache function. The default value is the maximum of the timeouts of the benchmarks using it.

Benchmark attributes¶

Each benchmark can have a number of arbitrary attributes assigned to it. The attributes that asv understands depends on the type of benchmark and are defined below. For free functions, just assign the attribute to the function. For methods, include the attribute at the class level. For example, the following are equivalent:

def time_range():
    for i in range(1000):
        pass
time_range.timeout = 120.0

class Suite:
    timeout = 120.0

    def time_range(self):
        for i in range(1000):
            pass

For the list of attributes, see Benchmark types and attributes.

Parameterized benchmarks¶

You might want to run a single benchmark for multiple values of some parameter. This can be done by adding a params attribute to the benchmark object:

def time_range(n):
   for i in range(n):
       pass
time_range.params = [0, 10, 20, 30]

This will also make the setup and teardown functions parameterized:

class Suite:
    params = [0, 10, 20]

    def setup(self, n):
        self.obj = range(n)

    def teardown(self, n):
        del self.obj

    def time_range_iter(self, n):
        for i in self.obj:
            pass

If setup raises a NotImplementedError, the benchmark is marked as skipped for the parameter values in question.

The parameter values can be any Python objects. However, it is often best to use only strings or numbers, because these have simple unambiguous text representations.

When you have multiple parameters, the test is run for all of their combinations:

def time_ranges(n, func_name):
    f = {'range': range, 'arange': numpy.arange}[func_name]
    for i in f(n):
        pass

time_ranges.params = ([10, 1000], ['range', 'arange'])

The test will be run for parameters (10, 'range'), (10, 'arange'), (1000, 'range'), (1000, 'arange').

You can also provide informative names for the parameters:

time_ranges.param_names = ['n', 'function']

These will appear in the test output; if not provided you get default names such as “param1”, “param2”.

Note that setup_cache is not parameterized.

Benchmark types¶

Timing¶

Timing benchmarks have the prefix time.

The timing itself is based on the Python standard library’s timeit module, with some extensions for automatic heuristics shamelessly stolen from IPython’s %timeit magic function. This means that in most cases the benchmark function itself will be run many times to achieve accurate timing.

The default timing function is timeit.default_timer, which uses the highest resolution clock available on a given platform to measure the elapsed wall time. This has the consequence of being more susceptible to noise from other processes, but the increase in resolution is more significant for shorter duration tests (particularly on Windows).

Process timing is provided by the function time.process_time (POSIX CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME), which measures the CPU time used only by the current process. You can change the timer by setting the benchmark’s timer attribute, for example to time.process_time to measure process time.

Note

One consequence of using time.process_time is that the time spent in child processes of the benchmark is not included. Multithreaded benchmarks also return the total CPU time counting all CPUs. In these cases you may want to measure the wall clock time, by setting the timer = timeit.default_timer benchmark attribute.

For best results, the benchmark function should contain as little as possible, with as much extraneous setup moved to a setup function:

class Suite:
    def setup(self):
        # load data from a file
        with open("/usr/share/words.txt", "r") as fd:
            self.words = fd.readlines()

    def time_upper(self):
        for word in self.words:
            word.upper()

How setup and teardown behave for timing benchmarks is similar to the Python timeit module, and the behavior is controlled by the number and repeat attributes.

For the list of attributes, see Benchmark types and attributes.

Memory¶

Memory benchmarks have the prefix mem.

Memory benchmarks track the size of Python objects. To write a memory benchmark, write a function that returns the object you want to track:

def mem_list():
    return [0] * 256

The asizeof module is used to determine the size of Python objects. Since asizeof includes the memory of all of an object’s dependencies (including the modules in which their classes are defined), a memory benchmark instead calculates the incremental memory of a copy of the object, which in most cases is probably a more useful indicator of how much space each additional object will use. If you need to do something more specific, a generic Tracking (Generic) benchmark can be used instead.

For details, see Benchmark types and attributes.

Note

The memory benchmarking feature is still experimental. asizeof may not be the most appropriate metric to use.

Note

The memory benchmarks are not supported on PyPy.

Peak Memory¶

Peak memory benchmarks have the prefix peakmem.

Peak memory benchmark tracks the maximum resident size (in bytes) of the process in memory. This does not necessarily count memory paged on-disk, or that used by memory-mapped files. To write a peak memory benchmark, write a function that does the operation whose maximum memory usage you want to track:

def peakmem_list():
    [0] * 165536

Note

The peak memory benchmark also counts memory usage during the setup routine, which may confound the benchmark results. One way to avoid this is to use setup_cache instead.

For details, see Benchmark types and attributes.

Tracking (Generic)¶

It is also possible to use asv to track any arbitrary numerical value. “Tracking” benchmarks can be used for this purpose and use the prefix track. These functions simply need to return a numeric value. For example, to track the number of objects known to the garbage collector at a given state:

import gc

def track_num_objects():
    return len(gc.get_objects())
track_num_objects.unit = "objects"

For details, see Benchmark types and attributes.

Benchmark versioning¶

When you edit benchmark’s code in the benchmark suite, this often changes what is measured, and previously measured results should be discarded.

Airspeed Velocity records with each benchmark measurement a “version number” for the benchmark. By default, it is computed by hashing the benchmark source code text, including any setup and setup_cache routines. If there are changes in the source code of the benchmark in the benchmark suite, the version number changes, and asv will ignore results whose version number is different from the current one.

It is also possible to control the versioning of benchmark results manually, by setting the .version attribute for the benchmark. The version number, i.e. content of the attribute, can be any Python string. asv only checks whether the version recorded with a measurement matches the current version, so you can use any versioning scheme.

See Benchmark types and attributes for reference documentation.