Difference between revisions of "Micro benchmarking"
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| − | Microbenchmarking is about measuring the time or performance | + | Microbenchmarking is about measuring the time or performance of small to very small building blocks of real programs. This can be a common data access pattern, a sequence of operations or even a single instruction. |
== Introduction == | == Introduction == | ||
| − | + | Microbenchmarking is an indispensable tool in performance engineering, which fulfills many purposes. Among other things it : | |
| − | * upper performance limits | + | * provides upper performance limits for sustained performance |
| − | * | + | * creates knowledge about performance behavior |
| − | * | + | * helps finding performance bugs in architectures |
| − | * input for performance models | + | * provides undocumented processor performance properties |
| + | * quantifies the cost of programming model constructs or runtime environments | ||
| + | * provides input for performance models | ||
| + | * helps to learn how software interacts with the hardware | ||
| + | One important feature of microbenchmarking is that it is not a black box but a tool to create knowledge and deeper understanding. | ||
| + | . | ||
== Available Tools == | == Available Tools == | ||
| + | The difficulty in microbenchmarking is to really measure what you are interested in. Because the things you want to measure are usually very small correct timing is a problem. Also separation of influences may be difficult to guarantee. If, e.g., implementing a microbenchmark in a programming language one must assure that the language does not add overhead that influences the results. Therefore it is usually recommended to use available benchmarks or tools which make it easier to produce meaningful results. | ||
| + | |||
| + | === STREAM benchmark | ||
== Links and further information == | == Links and further information == | ||
Revision as of 12:41, 5 June 2019
Microbenchmarking is about measuring the time or performance of small to very small building blocks of real programs. This can be a common data access pattern, a sequence of operations or even a single instruction.
Introduction
Microbenchmarking is an indispensable tool in performance engineering, which fulfills many purposes. Among other things it :
- provides upper performance limits for sustained performance
- creates knowledge about performance behavior
- helps finding performance bugs in architectures
- provides undocumented processor performance properties
- quantifies the cost of programming model constructs or runtime environments
- provides input for performance models
- helps to learn how software interacts with the hardware
One important feature of microbenchmarking is that it is not a black box but a tool to create knowledge and deeper understanding. .
Available Tools
The difficulty in microbenchmarking is to really measure what you are interested in. Because the things you want to measure are usually very small correct timing is a problem. Also separation of influences may be difficult to guarantee. If, e.g., implementing a microbenchmark in a programming language one must assure that the language does not add overhead that influences the results. Therefore it is usually recommended to use available benchmarks or tools which make it easier to produce meaningful results.
=== STREAM benchmark