NAME

perlbench - compare the relative speed of different versions of Perl

SYNOPSIS

% perlbench-run [-s] [-t filter] [-c cpu-factor] [-d results_dir]

DESCRIPTION

This is a Perl benchmark suite. It can be used to compare the relative speed of different versions of Perl. You run the benchmark by starting the 'perlbench-run' script giving the path-name of various Perls you want to test as argument. The perlbench-run program takes the following optional parameters:

-s               don't scale numbers (so that first perl is always 100)
-t <filter>      only tests that match <filter> regex are timed
-c <cpu-factor>  use this factor to scale tests instead of running the
                 'cpu_factor' program to determine it.
-d <dirname>     what directory to save results in

Creating new tests

The individual tests are found in a directory called "benchmarks". They expect to be started with at least a single number as argument. This number is the CPU speed factor as calculated by the 'cpu_factor' program. This factor is used to scale the number of iterations that the test must run to give measurable timing.

A new test is created by making a new file under the "benchmarks" directory. The filename should end with the *.t suffix. A test should look like this:

# Name: Regexp matching
# Require: 4

require 'benchlib.pl';

# YOUR SETUP CODE HERE
$a = 0;

&runtest(100, <<'ENDTEST');
   # YOUR TESTING CODE HERE
   $a++;  # for instance
ENDTEST

The first part of the test declares some properties of the test. The 'require' property means that you need a perl with version number greater or equal to this to run the test (same as the 'require NUM' does for perl5). You are advised to write the tests so that they can run under perl4 as well as perl5.

You should then load the benchlib.pl library. This will take care of the command line arguments and also provide the function &main::runtest() which will perform the testing. The first argument to runtest() is the test scale factor. It should be set to some number that makes the test run for about about 10 seconds when given a proper CPU factor command line argument. The second argument to runtest() is the code you want to test. The code should be suitable as the body inside a loop.

If you want to contribute some additional tests, please make a pull request at https://github.com/briandfoy/perlbench.

AUTHOR

Gisle Aas originally wrote the code, and it's still pretty much what he created.

Maintained by brian d foy, <bdfoy@cpan.org>.