README.md

emark

Lightweight benchmarking framework for Erlang.

It is a plugin for rebar which benchmarks your code.

Usage example

There is an example in examples/bench0 subdirectory. You need to create a symbolic link to emark, because Spawnfest's repo is (or could be) private.

cd examples/bench0
mkdir -p deps
ln -s `pwd`/../../ deps/emark
../../rebar compile
../../rebar emark

Details

emark works almost like eunit.

-include_lib("emark/include/emark.hrl").

-ifdef(BENCHMARK).

my_function_benchmark(N) ->
  Input = prepare_n_inputs(N),
  emark:start(?MODULE, my_function, 1),
  lists:seq(fun(E) -> _ = my_function(E) end, Input).

-endif.

The main difference is the emark:start call. It starts tracing the specified function, so it then knows how many times it was really called while benchmark was run. It also starts the actual timer, so preparation should be done before calling it.

emark prints benchmark results to the terminal. First column is the name of the function and its arity, second column is the number of iterations during the benchmark, thirs column is the average time it took the function to run (microseconds).

By default, emark also saves a report to a file under .emark/ directory. It's used on next run to show a difference between runs. So the idea behind emark is that you run benchmark (rebar emark), then change the code of some important function, and rerun benchmark to see if anything went better (or worse).