This is cairo's performance test suite. One of the simplest ways to run the performance suite is: make perf which will give a report of the speed of each individual test. See more details on other options for running the suite below. Running the cairo performance suite ----------------------------------- The performance suite is composed of two types of tests, micro- and macro-benchmarks. The micro-benchmarks are a series of hand-written, short, synthetic tests that measure the speed of doing a simple operation such as painting a surface or showing glyphs. These aim to give very good feedback on whether a performance related patch is successful without causing any performance degradations elsewhere. The second type of benchmark consists of replaying a cairo-trace from a large application during typical usage. These aim to give an overall feel as to whether cairo is faster for everyday use. Running the micro-benchmarks ---------------------------- The micro-benchmarks are compiled into a single executable called cairo-perf-micro, which is what "make perf" executes. Some examples of running it: # Report on all tests with default number of iterations: ./cairo-perf-micro # Report on 100 iterations of all gradient tests: ./cairo-perf-micro -i 100 gradient # Generate raw results for 10 iterations into cairo.perf ./cairo-perf-micro -r -i 10 > cairo.perf # Append 10 more iterations of the paint test ./cairo-perf-micro -r -i 10 paint >> cairo.perf Raw results aren't useful for reading directly, but are quite useful when using cairo-perf-diff to compare separate runs (see more below). The advantage of using the raw mode is that test runs can be generated incrementally and appended to existing reports. Running the macro-benchmarks ---------------------------- The macro-benchmarks are run by a single program called cairo-perf-trace, which is also executed by "make perf". cairo-perf-trace loops over the series of traces stored beneath cairo-traces/. cairo-perf-trace produces the same output and takes the same arguments as cairo-perf-micro. Some examples of running it: # Report on all tests with default number of iterations: ./cairo-perf-trace # Report on 100 iterations of all firefox tests: ./cairo-perf-trace -i 100 firefox # Generate raw results for 10 iterations into cairo.perf ./cairo-perf-trace -r -i 10 > cairo.perf # Append 10 more iterations of the poppler tests ./cairo-perf-trace -r -i 10 poppler >> cairo.perf Generating comparisons of separate runs --------------------------------------- It's often useful to generate a chart showing the comparison of two separate runs of the cairo performance suite, (for example, after applying a patch intended to improve cairo's performance). The cairo-perf-diff script can be used to compare two report files generated by cairo-perf. Again, by way of example: # Show performance changes from cairo-orig.perf to cairo-patched.perf ./cairo-perf-diff cairo-orig.perf cairo-patched.perf This will work whether the data files were generate in raw mode (with cairo-perf -r) or cooked, (cairo-perf without -r). Finally, in its most powerful mode, cairo-perf-diff accepts two git revisions and will do all the work of checking each revision out, building it, running cairo-perf for each revision, and finally generating the report. Obviously, this mode only works if you are using cairo within a git repository, (and not from a tar file). Using this mode is as simple as passing the git revisions to be compared to cairo-perf-diff: # Compare cairo 1.2.6 to cairo 1.4.0 ./cairo-perf-diff 1.2.6 1.4.0 # Measure the impact of the latest commit ./cairo-perf-diff HEAD~1 HEAD As a convenience, this common desire to measure a single commit is supported by passing a single revision to cairo-perf-diff, in which case it will compare it to the immediately preceeding commit. So for example: # Measure the impact of the latest commit ./cairo-perf-diff HEAD # Measure the impact of an arbitrary commit by SHA-1 ./cairo-perf-diff aa883123d2af90 Also, when passing git revisions to cairo-perf-diff like this, it will automatically cache results and re-use them rather than re-running cairo-perf over and over on the same versions. This means that if you ask for a report that you've generated in the past, cairo-perf-diff should return it immediately. Now, sometimes it is desirable to generate more iterations rather than re-using cached results. In this case, the -f flag can be used to force cairo-perf-diff to generate additional results in addition to what has been cached: # Measure the impact of latest commit (force more measurement) ./cairo-perf-diff -f And finally, the -f mode is most useful in conjunction with the -- option to cairo-perf-diff which allows you to pass options to the underlying cairo-perf runs. This allows you to restrict the additonal test runs to a limited subset of the tests. For example, a frequently used trick is to first generate a chart with a very small number of iterations for all tests: ./cairo-perf-diff HEAD Then, if any of the results look suspicious, (say there's a slowdown reported in the text tests, but you think the text test shouldn't be affected), then you can force more iterations to be tested for only those tests: ./cairo-perf-diff -f HEAD -- text Generating comparisons of different backends -------------------------------------------- An alternate question that is often asked is, "how does the speed of one backend compare to another?". cairo-perf-compare-backends can read files generated by cairo-perf and produces a comparison of the backends for every test. Again, by way of example: # Show relative performance of the backends ./cairo-perf-compare-backends cairo.perf This will work whether the data files were generate in raw mode (with cairo-perf -r) or cooked, (cairo-perf without -r). Creating a new performance test ------------------------------- This is where we could use everybody's help. If you have encountered a sequence of cairo operations that are slower than you would like, then please provide a performance test. Writing a test is very simple, it requires you to write only a small C file with a couple of functions, one of which exercises the cairo calls of interest. Here is the basic structure of a performance test file: /* Copyright © 2006 Kind Cairo User * * ... Licensing information here ... * Please copy the MIT blurb as in other tests */ #include "cairo-perf.h" static cairo_time_t do_my_new_test (cairo_t *cr, int width, int height) { cairo_perf_timer_start (); /* Make the cairo calls to be measured */ cairo_perf_timer_stop (); return cairo_perf_timer_elapsed (); } void my_new_test (cairo_perf_t *perf, cairo_t *cr, int width, int height) { /* First do any setup for which the execution time should not * be measured. For example, this might include loading * images from disk, creating patterns, etc. */ /* Then launch the actual performance testing. */ cairo_perf_run (perf, "my_new_test", do_my_new_test); /* Finally, perform any cleanup from the setup above. */ } That's really all there is to writing a new test. The first function above is the one that does the real work and returns a timing number. The second function is the one that will be called by the performance test rig (see below for how to accomplish that), and allows for multiple performance cases to be written in one file, (simply call cairo_perf_run once for each case, passing the appropriate callback function to each). We go through this dance of indirectly calling your own function through cairo_perf_run so that cairo_perf_run can call your function many times and measure statistical properties over the many runs. Finally, to fully integrate your new test case you just need to add your new test to three different lists. (TODO: We should set this up better so that the lists are maintained automatically---computed from the list of files in cairo/perf, for example). Here's what needs to be added: 1. Makefile.am: Add the new file name to the cairo_perf_SOURCES list 2. cairo-perf.h: Add a new CAIRO_PERF_DECL line with the name of your function, (my_new_test in the example above) 3. cairo-perf-micro.c: Add a new row to the list at the end of the file. A typical entry would look like: { my_new_test, 16, 64 } The last two numbers are a minimum and a maximum image size at which your test should be exercised. If these values are the same, then only that size will be used. If they are different, then intermediate sizes will be used by doubling. So in the example above, three tests would be performed at sizes of 16x16, 32x32 and 64x64. How to record new traces ----------------------- Using cairo-trace you can record the exact sequence of graphic operations made by an application and replay them later. These traces can then be used by cairo-perf-trace to benchmark the various backends and patches. To record a trace: $ cairo-trace --no-mark-dirty --no-callers $APPLICATION [$ARGV] --no-mark-dirty is useful for applications that are paranoid about surfaces being modified by external plugins outside of their control, the prime example here is firefox. --no-callers disables the symbolic caller lookup and so speeds tracing (dramatically for large c++ programs) and similarly speeds up the replay as the files are much smaller. The output file will be called $APPLICATION.$PID.trace, the actual path written to will be displayed on the terminal. Alternatively you can use: $ cairo-trace --profile $APPLICATION [$ARGV] which automatically passes --no-mark-dirty and --no-callers and compresses the resultant trace using LZMA. To use the trace with cairo-perf-trace you will first need to decompress it. Then to use cairo-perf-trace: $ ./cairo-perf-trace $APPLICATION.$PID.trace Alternatively you can put the trace into perf/cairo-traces, or set CAIRO_TRACE_DIR to point to your trace directory, and the trace will be included in the performance tests. If you record an interesting trace, please consider sharing it by compressing it, LZMA preferred, and posting a link to cairo@cairographics.org, or by uploading it to git.cairographics.org/cairo-traces. How to run cairo-perf-diff on WINDOWS ------------------------------------- This section explains the specifics of running cairo-perf-diff under win32 plateforms. It assumes that you have installed a UNIX-like shell environment such as MSYS (distributed as part of MinGW). 1. From your Mingw32 window, be sure to have all of your MSVC environ- ment variables set up for proper compilation using 'make' 2. Add the %GitBaseDir%/Git/bin path to your environment, replacing the %GitBaseDir% by whatever directory your Git version is installed to. 3. Comment out the "UNSET CDPATH" line in the git-sh-setup script (located inside the ...Git/bin directory) by putting a "#" at the beginning of the line. you should be ready to go ! From your mingw32 window, go to your cairo/perf directory and run the cairo-perf-diff script with the right arguments. Thanks for your contributions and have fun with cairo!