README.md

Solidus Benchmark

This is a suite of benchmarks testing the relative performance of different Solidus versions.

The results can be viewed at benchmarks.solidus.io

Running Benchmarks

To run all benchmarks against all versions of Solidus on both MySQL and PostgreSQL, simply run:

rake benchmark:all

This will save results as json files in the data/ directory.

The suite can be run on just one version using

rake benchmark

A single file can be run using

ruby -Isuite suite/some_benchmark.rb

Rendering website

Just run:

ruby render.rb

This will generate webpages in the output/ directory based on the results in the data/ directory.

Writing benchmarks

Benchmarks are composed of three steps setup, before, and measure

SolidusBenchmark.new "order/update/cart" do
  setup do
    FactoryGirl.create(:order_with_line_items, line_items_count: 2)
  end

  before do
    @order = Spree::Order.first
    @order.update!
  end

  measure do
    @order.update!
  end
end

Benchmarks are run as follows:

• Run setup block once to pre-populate the database with some data for the test.
• Loop until sufficient data is collected:
  • Run before block to perform any tasks that should be run before the actual test. This may be used to clean any data from the previous run of measure
  • Run measure block. This operation is what is actually measured.
• Run DatabaseCleaner to truncate databased

Limitations

• benchmarks.solidus.io is generated from my work computer (i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz). While not totally unreasonable, it would be better to run benchmarks on a machine more like what's generally used in production (like an EC2 instance) and with a database on a separate machine.
• The benchmarks are somewhat synthetic. Setup for each benchmark creates data relevant to the test. A real production database would have a lot more records in every table.
• The method of measurement works well for measuring relatively slow methods (more than ~50 microseconds), but would be a poor fit for micobenchmarks. Tools like the excellent benchmark-ips are more suitable for that task.