Changelog

  • Benchmarks now have a timeout. Patch by Diego Russo.

  • The example code in bench_time_func.py uses the more modern time.perf_counter(). Patch by Hajime Senuma.

  • pystats are now correctly collected in subprocesses. Patch by Michael Droettboom.

  • pyperf now supports “hooks” to add custom functionality around each benchmarking call. pystats are no longer collected automatically, and you must pass –hook pystats. Patch by Michael Droettboom.

  • Memory units are now correctly stated in KiB and MiB. Patch by Ungve Mardal Moe.

  • max_mem_rss is now correctly measured on macOS. Patch by Michael Droettboom.

  • pyperf system tune now works correctly on aarch64. Patch by Diego Russo.

Version 2.7.0 (2024-05-18)

  • Fix logic in MSR availability test. Patch by Mike Droettboom.

  • Disable tuning TurboBoost setting on non-Intel device. Patch by Mike Droettboom.

  • Include CONFIG_ARGS in Metadata. Patch by Jeff Glass.

  • Support environment variables PYTHON_GIL / PYTHON_CPU_COUNT. Patch by Donghee Na.

Version 2.6.3 (2024-03-05)

Version 2.6.2 (2023-11-02)

  • Now, pystats stats are collected during warmups. Patch by Mike Droettboom.

  • system: Fix detection of battery. Patch by Victor Stinner

Version 2.6.1 (2023-06-12)

  • Fix a possible attribute error in argument parsing. Patch by Colton Myers

Version 2.6.0 (2023-03-22)

  • Inherit PYTHONPATH environment variable by default. Patch by Theodore Ni.

  • Runner.bench_async_func() takes an optional loop_factory to support custom loop construction. Patch by Itamar O.

Version 2.5.0 (2022-11-04)

  • Support collecting specialization statistics from running benchmarks. Patch by Mike Droettboom.

  • Recognize new name of Graal-based Python as jitted. Patch by Michael Droettboom

Version 2.4.1 (2022-08-07)

  • Reject –tracemalloc in pyperf command. Patch by Yichen Yan

Version 2.4.0 (2022-07-20)

  • pyperf now recognizes pyston as the JIT-based implementation. Patch by Kevin Modzelewski.

  • Runner CLI now supports --profile=PROFILE option for profiling benchmarks. Patch by Michael Droettboom.

Version 2.3.1 (2022-02-03)

  • Add a Runner.bench_async_func() to benchmark an asyncio coroutine. Patch by Inada Naoki.

  • pyperf now recognizes graalpython as the JIT-based implementation. Patch by Tim Felgentreff.

Version 2.3.0 (2021-09-28)

  • pyperf ref:compare_to command <compare_to_cmd> now supports the --table-format option which can designate the table format between reST and markdown.

Version 2.2.0 (2021-03-24)

Version 2.1.0 (2021-01-14)

  • The compare_to command now computes the geometric mean.

  • The compare_to command no longer displays percentages: display less numbers to make the output easier to read. Also, percentage were almost the same values than the xxx faster or xxx slower values, but rounded differently which introduced confusion.

  • Project moved to https://github.com/psf/pyperf/

  • system command now only emits a warning rather than failing with a hard error if it fails to get or set the frequency of a CPU.

  • The pyperf project is now covered by the PSF Code of Conduct.

Version 2.0.0 (2020-03-19)

  • Drop Python 2 support. Use pyperf 1.7.1 if you still need Python 2.7 support.

  • Remove python_unicode metadata.

  • pyperf.perf_counter() is now deprecated: use time.perf_counter() directly.

Version 1.7.1 (2020-03-09)

  • Support Python 3.8: time.clock() no longer exists.

Version 1.7.0 (2019-12-17)

  • metadata: add python_compiler

  • Windows: inherit SystemDrive environment variable by default. Contribution by Steve Dower.

  • Fix tests on ARM and PPC: cpu_model_name metadata is no longer required on Linux.

  • tests: Do not allow test suite to execute without unittest2 on Python2, otherwise man failures occur due to missing ‘assertRegex’. Contribution by John Vandenberg.

  • doc: Update old/dead links.

  • Travis CI: drop Python 3.4 support.

Version 1.6.1 (2019-05-21)

The project name changes to “pyperf” from “perf”, to avoid confusion with the Linux perf project which has a Python binding called “perf” as well.

Version 1.6.0 (2019-01-11)

  • Add teardown optional parameter to Runner.timeit and --teardown option to the perf timeit command. Patch by Alex Khomchenko.

  • Runner.timeit(stmt) can now be used to use the statement as the benchmark name.

  • Port system tune command to Python 2 (use lseek+read/write instead of pread/pwrite which aren’t available on Python 2). Patch by Stefan Talpalaru.

  • perf collect_metadata now also supports reading CPU frequencies on IBM Z.

Version 1.5.1 (2018-01-10)

  • Fix --track-memory option of the Runner.bench_command() command.

Version 1.5 (2018-01-09)

  • Fix --track-memory and --tracemalloc options. Add non regression tests.

  • Remove the --max-time option of Runner, it was ignored.

  • Project moved from https://github.com/haypo/perf to https://github.com/vstinner/perf

  • system command: In case the system is not ready for benchmarking, makes system show exits with return code 2 so bash scripts could put ‘python -m perf system show’ directly without greping for the output. Contributed by Boris Feld.

  • On Windows: Enables high priority for processes when benchmarking (REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS). Contributed by Steve Dower.

Version 1.4 (2017-07-06)

  • Fix parse_cpu_list(): strip also NUL characters

  • Add examples to the README file. Contributed by Alex Willmer.

Version 1.3 (2017-05-29)

  • Add get_loops() and get_inner_loops() methods to Run and Benchmark classes

  • Documentation: add export_csv.py and plot.py examples

  • Rewrite warmup calibration for PyPy:

    • Use Q1, Q3 and stdev, rather than mean and checking if the first value is an outlier

    • Always use a sample of 10 values, rather than using a sample of a variable size starting with 3 values

  • Use lazy import for most imports of the largest modules to reduce the number of imported module on ‘import perf’.

  • Fix handling of broken pipe error to prevent logging the error: “Exception ignored in: … BrokenPipeError: …”

  • collect_metadata gets more metadata on FreeBSD:

    • use os.getloadavg() if /proc/loadavg is not available (ex: FreeBSD)

    • use psutil.boot_time() if /proc/stat is not available (ex: FreeBSD) to get boot_time and uptime metadata

  • The Runner constructor now raises an exception if more than one instance is created.

Version 1.2 (2017-04-10)

  • stats command: count the number of outliers

  • Rewrite the calibration code to support PyPy:

    • On PyPy, calibrate also the number of warmups

    • On PyPy, recalibrate the number of loops and warmups

    • Loop calibration now uses the number of warmups and values instead of 1 to compute warmup values

    • A worker process cannot calibrate the number of loops and compute values. These two operations now require two worker processes.

  • Command line interface (CLI): the --benchmark, --include-benchmark and --exclude-benchmark options can now be specified multiple times.

  • Rewrite dump command:

    • Writes one value per line

    • Now display also metadata of calibration runs

    • Enhance formatting of calibration runs

    • Display number of warmup, value and loop

  • Add new run metadata:

    • calibrate_loops, recalibrate_loops: number of loops of loop calibration/recalibration runs

    • calibrate_warmups, recalibrate_warmups: number of warmups of warmup calibration/recalibration runs

Version 1.1 (2017-03-27)

  • Add a new “perf command” command to measure the timing of a program

  • Runner.bench_command() now measures also the maximum RSS memory if available.

  • Fix Windows 32bit issue on Python 2.7, fix by yattom.

  • Runner.bench_func() now uses functools.partial() if the function has argument. Calling partial() is now 1.07x faster (-6%) than calling func(*args).

  • Store memory values as integers, not float, when tracking memory usage (--track-memory and --tracemalloc options)

Version 1.0 (2017-03-17)

Enhancements:

  • stats command now displays percentiles

  • hist command now also checks the benchmark stability by default

  • dump command now displays raw value of calibration runs.

  • Add Benchmark.percentile() method

Backward incompatible changes:

  • Remove the compare command to only keep the compare_to command which is better defined

  • Run warmup values must now be normalized per loop iteration.

  • Remove format() and __str__() methods from Benchmark. These methods were too opinionated.

  • Rename --name=NAME option to --benchmark=NAME

  • Remove perf.monotonic_clock() since it wasn’t monotonic on Python 2.7.

  • Remove is_significant() from the public API

Other changes:

  • check command now only complains if min/max is 50% smaller/larger than the mean, instead of 25%.

Version 0.9.6 (2017-03-15)

Major change:

  • Display Mean +- std dev instead of Median +- std dev

Enhancements:

  • Add a new Runner.bench_command() method to measure the execution time of a command.

  • Add mean(), median_abs_dev() and stdev() methods to Benchmark

  • check command: test also minimum and maximum compared to the mean

Major API change, rename “sample” to “value”:

  • Rename attributes and methods:

    • Benchmark.bench_sample_func() => Benchmark.bench_time_func().

    • Run.samples => Run.values

    • Benchmark.get_samples() => Benchmark.get_values()

    • get_nsample() => get_nvalue()

    • Benchmark.format_sample() => Benchmark.format_value()

    • Benchmark.format_samples() => Benchmark.format_values()

  • Rename Runner command line options:

    • --samples => --values

    • --debug-single-sample => --debug-single-value

Changes:

  • convert: Remove --remove-outliers option

  • check command now tests stdev/mean, instead of testing stdev/median

  • setup.py: statistics dependency is now installed using extras_require to support setuptools 18 and newer

  • Add setup.cfg to enable universal builds: same wheel package for Python 2 and Python 3

  • Add perf.VERSION constant: tuple of int

  • JSON version 6: write metadata common to all benchmarks (common to all runs of all benchmarks) at the root; rename ‘samples’ to ‘values’ in runs.

Version 0.9.5 (2017-03-06)

  • Add --python-names option to the Runner CLI

  • system show command now checks if the system is ready for benchmarking

  • Fix --compare-to option: the benchmark was run twice with the reference Python, instead of being run first with reference Python and then changed Python.

  • Runner now raises an exception if a benchmark name is not unique.

  • compare_to command now keeps the original order of benchmarks, only sort if --by-speed option is used.

  • Fix system command on macOS on non-existent /proc and /sys pseudo-files.

  • Fix system bugs on systems with more than 32 processors.

Version 0.9.4 (2017-03-01)

New features:

  • Add --compare-to option to the Runner CLI

  • compare_to command: Add --table option to render a table

Bugfixes:

  • Fix the abs_executable() function used to find the absolute path to the Python program. Don’t follow symbolic links to support correctly virtual environments.

Version 0.9.3 (2017-01-16)

  • Fix the Windows support.

  • system: Don’t try to read or write CPU frequency when the /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ directory doesn’t exist. For example, virtual machines don’t have this directory.

  • Fix a ResourceWarning in BenchmarkSuite.dump() for gzip files.

Version 0.9.2 (2016-12-15)

  • Issue #15: Added --no-locale command line option and locale environment variables are now inherited by default.

  • Add Runner.timeit() method.

  • Fix stats command: display again statistics on the whole benchmark suite.

  • Fix a ResourceWarning if interrupted: Runner now kills the worker process when interrupted.

  • compare and compare_to: add percent difference to faster/slower

  • Rewrite timeit internally: copy code from CPython 3.7 and adapt it to PyPy.

Version 0.9.1 (2016-11-18)

  • system tune now also sets the maximum sample rate of perf event.

  • system show command now also displays advices, not only system tune

  • system now detects when running on a laptop with the power cable unplugged.

  • system tune now handles errors when /dev/cpu/N/msr device is missing: log an error suggesting to load the msr kernel module

  • Fix a ResourceWarning in Runner._spawn_worker_suite(): wait until the worker completes.

Version 0.9.0 (2016-11-07)

Enhancements:

  • Runner doesn’t ignore worker stdout and stderr anymore. Regular print() now works as expected.

  • system command: Add a new --affinity command line option

  • check and system emit a warning if nohz_full is used with the intel_pstate driver.

  • collect_metadata: On CPUs not using the intel_pstate driver, don’t run the cpupower command anymore to check if the Turbo Boost is enabled. It avoids to spawn N processes in each worker process, where N is the number of CPUs used by the worker process. The system command can be used to tune correctly Turbo Boost, or just to check the state of Turbo Boost.

Changes:

  • system: tune stops the irqbalance service and sets the CPU affinity of interruptions (IRQ).

  • The --stdout internal option has been removed, replaced by a new --pipe option. Workers can now use stdout for regular messages.

  • get_dates() methods now return None rather than an empty tuple if runs don’t have the date metadata.

Version 0.8.3 (2016-11-03)

Enhancement:

  • New system tune command to tune the system for benchmarks: disable Turbo Boost, check isolated CPUs, set CPU frequency, set CPU scaling governor to “performance”, etc.

  • Support reading and writing JSON files compressed by gzip: use gzip if the filename ends with .gz

  • The detection of isolated CPUs now works also on Linux older than 4.2: /proc/cmdline is now parsed to read the isolcpus= option if /sys/devices/system/cpu/isolated sysfs doesn’t exist.

Backward incompatible changes:

  • JSON file produced by perf 0.8.3 cannot be read by perf 0.8.2 anymore.

  • Remove the Metadata class: values of get_metadata() are directly metadata values.

  • Drop support for JSON produced with perf 0.7.3 and older. Use perf 0.8.2 to convert old JSON to new JSON.

Optimizations:

  • Loading a large JSON file is now 10x faster (5 sec => 500 ms).

  • Optimize Benchmark.add_run(): don’t recompute common metadata at each call, but update existing common metadata.

  • Don’t store dates of metadata as datetime.datetime but strings to optimize Benchmark.load()

Version 0.8.2 (2016-10-19)

  • Fix formatting of benchmark which only contains calibration runs.

Version 0.8.1 (2016-10-19)

  • Rename metadata command to collect_metadata

  • Add new commands: metadata (display metadata of benchmarks files) and check (check if benchmarks seem stable)

  • timeit: add --duplicate option to reduce the overhead of the outer loop.

  • BenchmarkSuite constructor now requires a non-empty sequence of Benchmark objects.

  • Store date in metadata with microsecond resolution.

  • collect_metadata: add --output command line option.

  • Bugfix: don’t follow symbolic links when getting the absolute path to a Python executable. The venv module requires to use the symlink to get the modules installed in a virtual environment.

Version 0.8.0 (2016-10-14)

The API was redesigned to support running multiple benchmarks with a single Runner object.

Enhancements:

  • --loops command line argument now accepts x^y syntax. For example, --loops=2^8 uses 256 iterations

  • Calibratation is now done in a dedicated process to avoid side effect on the first process. This change is important if Python has a JIT compiler, to get more reliable timings on the first worker computing samples.

Incompatible API changes:

  • Benchmark constructor now requires a non-empty sequence of Run objects.

  • A benchmark must now have a name: all runs must have a name metadata.

  • Remove name argument from Runner constructor and add name parameter to Benchmark.bench_func() and Benchmark.bench_sample_func()

  • perf.text_runner.TextRunner becomes simply perf.Runner. Remove the perf.text_runner module.

  • TextRunner.program_args attribute becomes a parameter of Runner constructor. program_args must no more start with sys.executable which is automatically added, since the executable can now be overridden by the --python command line option.

  • The TextRunner.prepare_subprocess_args attribute becomes a new add_cmdline_args parameter of Runner constructor which is called with different arguments than the old prepare_subprocess_args callback.

Changes:

  • Add show_name optional parameter to Runner. The runner now displays the benchmark name by default.

  • The calibration is now done after starting tracing memory

  • Run constructor now accepts an empty list of samples. Moreover, it also accepts int and long number types for warmup sample values, not only float.

  • Add a new private --worker-task command line option to only execute a specific benchmark function by its identifier.

  • Runner now supports calling more than one benchmark function using --worker-task internally.

  • Benchmark.dump() and BenchmarkSuite.dump() now fails by default if the file already exists. Set the new replace parameter to true to allow to replace an existing file.

Version 0.7.12 (2016-09-30)

  • Add --python command line option

  • timeit: add --name, --inner-loops and --compare-to options

  • TextRunner don’t set CPU affinity of the main process, only on worker processes. It may help a little bit when using NOHZ_FULL.

  • metadata: add boot_time and uptime on Linux

  • metadata: add idle driver to cpu_config

Version 0.7.11 (2016-09-19)

  • Fix metadata when NOHZ is not used: when /sys/devices/system/cpu/nohz_full contains `` (null)n``

Version 0.7.10 (2016-09-17)

  • Fix metadata when there is no isolated CPU

  • Fix collecting metadata when /sys/devices/system/cpu/nohz_full doesn’t exist

Version 0.7.9 (2016-09-17)

  • Add Benchmark.get_unit() method

  • Add BenchmarkSuite.get_metadata() method

  • metadata: add nohz_full and isolated to cpu_config

  • add --affinity option to the metadata command

  • convert: fix --remove-all-metadata, keep the unit

  • metadata: fix regex to get the Mercurial revision for python_version, support also locally modified source code (revision ending with “+”)

Version 0.7.8 (2016-09-10)

  • Worker child processes are now run in a fresh environment: environment variables are removed, to enhance reproducibility.

  • Add --inherit-environ command line argument.

  • metadata: add python_cflags, fix python_version for PyPy and add also the Mercurial version into python_version (if available)

Version 0.7.7 (2016-09-07)

  • Reintroduce TextRunner._spawn_worker_suite() as a temporary workaround to fix the pybench benchmark of the performance module.

Version 0.7.6 (2016-09-02)

Tracking memory usage now works correctly on Linux and Windows. The calibration is now done in the first worker process.

  • --tracemalloc and --track-memory now use the memory peak as the unique sample for the run.

  • Rewrite code to track memory usage on Windows. Add mem_peak_pagefile_usage metadata. The win32api module is no more needed, the code now uses the ctypes module.

  • convert: add --remove-all-metadata and --update-metadata commands

  • Add unit metadata: byte, integer or second.

  • Run samples can now be integer (not only float).

  • Don’t round samples to 1 nanosecond anymore: with a large number of loops (ex: 2^24), rounding reduces the accuracy.

  • The benchmark calibration is now done by the first worker process

Version 0.7.5 (2016-09-01)

  • Add Benchmark.update_metadata() method

  • Warmup samples can now be zero. TextRunner now raises an error if a sample function returns zero for a sample, except of calibration and warmup samples.

Version 0.7.4 (2016-08-18)

  • Support PyPy

  • metadata: add mem_max_rss and python_hash_seed

  • Add perf.python_implementation() and perf.python_has_jit() functions

  • In workers, calibration samples are now stored as warmup samples.

  • With a JIT (PyPy), the calibration is now done in each worker. The warmup step can compute more warmup samples if a raw sample is shorter than the minimum time.

  • Warmups of Run objects are now lists of (loops, raw_sample) rather than lists of samples. This change requires a change in the JSON format.

Version 0.7.3 (2016-08-17)

  • add a new slowest command

  • convert: add --extract-metadata=NAME

  • add --tracemalloc option: use the tracemalloc module to track Python memory allocation and get the peak of memory usage in metadata (tracemalloc_peak)

  • add --track-memory option: run a thread reading the memory usage every millisecond and store the peak as mem_peak metadata

  • compare_to: add --group-by-speed (-G) and --min-speed options

  • metadata: add runnable_threads

  • Fix issues on ppc64le Power8

Version 0.7.2 (2016-07-21)

  • Add start/end dates and duration to the stats command

  • Fix the program name: pyperf, not pybench!

  • Fix the -b command line option of show/stats/… commands

  • Fix metadata: load_avg_1min=0.0 is valid!

Version 0.7.1 (2016-07-18)

  • Fix the --append command line option

Version 0.7 (2016-07-18)

  • Add a new pybench program, similar to python3 -m perf

  • Most perf CLI commands now support multiple files and support benchmark suites.

  • Add a new dump command to the perf CLI and a --dump option to the TextRunner CLI

  • convert command: add --indent and --remove-warmups options

  • replace --json option with -o/--output

  • New metadata:

    • cpu_config

    • cpu_freq

    • cpu_temp

    • load_avg_1min

Changes:

  • New add_runs() function.

  • Once again, rewrite Run and Benchmark API. Benchmark name is now optional.

  • New Run class: it now stores normalized samples rather than raw samples

  • Metadata are now stored in Run, no more in Benchmark. Benchmark.get_metadata() return metadata common to all runs.

  • Metadata become typed (can have a different type than string), the new Metadata class formats them.

Version 0.6 (2016-07-06)

Major change: perf now supports benchmark suites. A benchmark suite is made of multiple benchmarks. perf commands now accepts benchmark suites as well.

New features:

  • New convert command

  • Add new command line options to TextRunner:

    • --fast, --rigorous

    • --hist, --stats

    • --json-append

    • --quiet

Changes:

  • Remove --max-time option of TextRunner

  • Replace --raw option with --worker

  • Replace --json with --stdout

  • Replace --json-file with --json

  • New perf convert command to convert or modify a benchmark suite

  • Remove perf hist_scipy command, replaced with an example in the doc

  • Add back “Mean +- Std dev” to the stats command

  • Add get_loops() method to Benchmark

  • Replace python3 -m perf.timeit (with dot) CLI with -m perf timeit (without dot)

  • Add perf.BenchmarkSuite class

  • name is now mandatory: it must be a non-empty string in Benchmark and TextRunner.

  • A single JSON file can now contain multiple benchmarks

  • Add a dependency to the six module Benchmark.add_run() now raises an exception if a sample is zero.

  • Benchmark.name becomes a property and is now stored in metadata

  • TextRunner now uses powers of 2, rather than powers of 10, to calibrate the number of loops

Version 0.5 (2016-06-29)

Changes:

  • The hist command now accepts multiple files

  • hist and hist_scipy commands got a new --bins option

  • Replace mean with median

  • Add perf.Benchmark.median() method, remove Benchmark.mean() method

  • Benchmark.get_metadata() method removed: use directly the perf.Benchmark.metadata attribute

  • Add timer metadata. python_version now also contains the architecture (32 or 64 bits).

Version 0.4 (2016-06-15)

New features:

  • New hist and hist_scipy commands: display an histogram (text or graphical mode)

  • New stats command: display statistics on a benchmark result

  • New --affinity=CPU_LIST command line option

  • Emit a warning or an error in English if the standard deviation is larger than 10% and/or the shortest sample is shorter than 1 ms

  • Emit a warning or an error if the shortest sample took less than 1 ms

  • Add perf_version, duration metadata. Moreover, the date metadata is now displayed.

API:

  • The API deeply changed to minimize duplications of data and make the JSON files more compact

Changes:

  • The command line interface also changed. For example, perf.metadata command becomes perf metadata.

  • On Python 2, psutil optional dependency is now used for CPU affinity. It ensures that CPU affinity is set for loop calibration too.

  • On Python 2, add dependency to the backported statistics module

  • perf.mean() and perf.stdev() functions have been removed: use the statistics module (which is available on Python 2.7 and Python 3)

  • New optional dependency on boltons (boltons.statsutils) to compute even more statistics in the stats and hist_scipy commands

Version 0.3 (2016-06-10)

  • Add compare and compare_to commands to the -m perf CLI

  • TextRunner is now able to spawn child processes, parse command arguments and more features

  • If TextRunner detects isolated CPUs, it sets automatically the CPU affinity to these isolated CPUs

  • Add --json-file command line option

  • Add TextRunner.bench_sample_func() method

  • Add examples of the API to the documentation. Split also the documentation into subpages.

  • Add metadata cpu_affinity

  • Add perf.is_significant() function

  • Move metadata from Benchmark to RunResult

  • Rename the Results class to Benchmark

  • Add inner_loops attribute to TextRunner, used for microbenchmarks when an instruction is manually duplicated multiple times

Version 0.2 (2016-06-07)

  • use JSON to exchange results between processes

  • new python3 -m perf CLI

  • new TextRunner class

  • huge enhancement of the timeit module

  • timeit has a better output format in verbose mode and now also supports a -vv (very verbose) mode. Minimum and maximum are not more shown in verbose module, only in very verbose mode.

  • metadata: add python_implementation and aslr

Version 0.1 (2016-06-02)

  • First public release