PHPBench 1.0.0-alpha5

Last modified 2022/09/14 11:14

PHPBench

PHPBench Alpha 5 as been tagged.

I tagged PHPBench Alpha 1 in about 5 months ago since that time numerous improvements and features have been introduced, I will talk about three of them.

Local Executor

One problem I had when developing benchmarks is that it’s difficult to debug when the benchmark launches in a separate process, for this reason there is now the local executor:

$ phpbench run --executor=local

Will run the benchmark in the same process as PHPBench, allowing you to do whatever you need to do (var_dump($foo);die()) to debug your benchmark.

Better Assertion and Baseline Feedback

The default progress logger has been simplified. If a --ref baseline reference is given it also shows the percent difference:

Progress

If an assertion fails it is highlighted RED, if it is tolerated it is CYAN and if the assertion passes unambiguously it is GREEN.

There will be more work on the real-time progress output in subsequent versions reducing the need for using --report=aggregate allowing faster feedback.

New Assertion DSL

The original assertion DSL introduced in alpha1 was quite limited. Probably the biggest issue was that you could only assert against hardcoded and pre-calculated values, other than that it only allowed simple comparisons.

The assertions now use a custom expression language is much more comprehensive featuring (for example) arithmetic, logical operators, operator precdence, and functions.

/**
 * @Assert("mode(variant.time.avg) as ms < mode(baseline.time.avg) as ms +/- 5%")
 */
public function benchFoo(): void
{
}

It provides full access to ANY metrics which were recorded against an iteration, by default time and memory - but extensions could theoretically provide, for example, the number of function calls.

Assertions

Assertion results are displayed and partially evaluated to provide better context.

Integrated Documentation

The new examples in the documentation are included from code which is executed in continuous integration.

Next Steps

I think PHPBench 1.0.0 is getting closer. The new expression language can also help with other aspects of PHPBench:

  • Reporting: The current “report generator” is inflexible. With the new expression language it should be far easier to achieve the same thing with only expressions: --report='{"name": "benchmark.name", "mode": "mode(variant.time.avg) as ms", "best": "min(variant.time.avg) as ms", "stdev": "stdev(variant.time.avg) as ms"}'
  • Progress: The ability to easily customize the progress output, for example: format("%s %s vs %s", variant.benchmark.name,mode(variant.time.avg) as ms, mode(baseline.time.avg) as ms